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Differences in Self-Reported Cancer Measures Persist Despite Covid-Era Improved Insurance Access
Get PDFBackground:
The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged healthcare access, jeopardizing cancer-related health measures. However, pandemic-era health policies led to increased health insurance coverage across most counties in the United States. This study aims to explore relationships between uninsured rates and cancer prevalence and screening behaviors.
Methods:
Data were collected from the CDC’s PLACES datasets for the 2021 (collected 2018-2019) and 2024 (collected 2022) release years and merged at the county level. For both 2021 and 2024 releases, Pearson’s correlation and student’s t-test were performed between uninsured rates and the age-standardized rates of the following at the county level: cancer prevalence, colorectal cancer screening, and mammography. Percentage and percentage-point changes in county age-standardized prevalence from the 2021 to 2024 reports were then calculated for the same variables, after which Pearson’s correlation was determined for relationships by rate of change.
Results:
The median uninsured rate among adults aged 18-64 decreased from 16.5% to 10.5% from 2019 to 2022. Negative correlations between uninsured rate and cancer measures remained steady or worsened as follows: The correlation between uninsured rate and self-reported cancer prevalence strengthened from borderline weakly negative in 2019 (R = 0.20, p \u3c 0.001) to moderately negative in 2022 (R = 0.58, p \u3c 0.001). The correlation between uninsured rate and colorectal cancer screening remained strongly negative (R = 0.64 in 2018-2019, R = 0.61 in 2022, p \u3c 0.001 both years). The correlation between uninsurance and mammography strengthened from weakly negative (R = 0.28 in 2018-2019, p \u3c 0.001) to borderline moderately negative (R = 0.40 in 2022, p \u3c 0.001). There was a moderately positive correlation between percentage point change in uninsured status from 2019 to 2022 and change in self-reported cancer prevalence from 2019 to 2022 (R = 0.48, p \u3c 0.001), but relationships with changes in colorectal cancer screening and mammography were negligible.
Conclusions:
The persistence of negative relationships between county uninsured rates and cancer screening measures indicates the need for further promotion of screening access in at-risk communities. The counterintuitive inverse relationship between uninsurance and self-reported cancer prevalence requires further assessment given the risk of underdiagnosis in counties with lower screening rates. These challenges are exacerbated by the 2023 expiry of pandemic-era emergency policies to promote health insurance access, necessitating ongoing inquiry as new data on uninsurance are released
Challenge Appraisals, Parasympathetic Physiology, and Social Problem-Solving Behaviors in Childhood
No full textChildren’s responses to new, unfamiliar social interactions should be influenced by their cognitive appraisals and physiology, though little is known about how these constructs interrelate. To investigate these links, we examined whether children’s appraisals of recalled events and resting parasympathetic physiology predicted social problem-solving behavior during a novel social interaction structured lab task. A diverse sample of 184 children 4 to 11 years old (Mage = 7.70 years, SD = 2.30; 50.5% girls) encountered an unfamiliar researcher who behaved oddly and wore a scary mask. Contrary to expectations, overall appraisals did not predict social problem-solving behavior. However, an exploratory analysis revealed that previously having made a prior challenge appraisal of an “angry” autobiographical experience predicted greater social problem-solving behavior. As anticipated, higher resting physiology was associated with more social problem-solving. This study provides initial insight into how appraisals and physiology shape children’s behavior and influence their ability to tackle real-world social problems
Walls of Cinema: Murals, Medium, and Community in Agnès Varda’s Mur murs (1981) and Visages Villages (2016)
No full textPaul Grimault, Jacques Prévert, and Engagée Animation: The Case of The King and the Bird
No full textFew people are familiar with the animator who at one point was known in France as the French Walt Disney. But his 1980 The King and the Bird is no saccharine Snow White. Drawing from “The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep” by Hans Christian Andersen, Grimault and Prévert created a film that not only allegorizes the Vichy Regime headed by the Maréchal Pétain. It also provides more broadly a critique of autocratic regimes and societies of surveillance in which mass-produced, industrialized art serves the purpose of political propaganda instead of freedom. I foreground Grimault and Prévert’s continuous dedication to committed or engagée animation emblematized in the film and consider the ways in which their work brings together questions of artistic freedom and social justice
Chronic Illness Education 2025: Improving the Understanding of the Complexities Underlying Adult Obesity
No full textChallenging the Operations of Power in the Pandemic Plot: A Hydrofeminist Reading of Water in Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat
No full textThis paper explores the motif of water in Sarah Hall’s novel Burntcoat (2021), written during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a symbol of interconnectedness and transformation. It examines how water challenges conventional boundaries between identity, the body, and the environment. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’ concept of hydrofeminism, the analysis investigates how Hall employs watery imagery to address themes of corporeality and the dynamic interplay between humanity and nature in the context of a global pandemic. Through a hydrofeminist lens, this study highlights how Burntcoat engages with the pandemic’s realities, encouraging readers to reimagine their relationship with the natural world. By positioning Burntcoat within hydrofeminist discourse, the paper underscores water as a metaphor for dissolving rigid boundaries and fostering a holistic understanding of existence, thereby contributing to the literary analysis of watery imagery in “corona literature.
On Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel
Get PDFMetamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel by Spencer Jordan. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2024. Pp. 233. Hardback
Negotiating Queer Arab Formalisms: Anyab (1981) and the Erotics of Egyptian Horror Cinema
No full textHorror has a queer place in the history of Middle East cinema. Much like “queer” cinema itself, the horror genre appears to be absent, marginal, or otherwise forgotten in the region.1 Staging the simultaneity of these absences—of horror and of queerness—this essay turns to an exemplary and at times quite exceptional case in this overlooked history: Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 Anyab (أنياب), or Fangs, an unfaithful “Egyptianized” remake of Jim Sharman’s queer cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).2 A then he avily censored and now largely forgotten film, Anyab sits at the queer margins of both Egyptian cinema and global horror film history. At this precarious intersection, I theorize the film’s queerness as an aesthetic practice with political consequence. Anyab is, I argue, a class-conscious play with form, where the erotics of the text are specifically deployed to indict Egypt’s then-recent foray into global capitalism and its proliferation of a neoliberal “good life” fantasy. Against the larger cultural suspicions that associate queerness with Western bourgeois values, Anyab offers an elastic, adaptable, and often ambivalent framework for locating and negotiating the presence of insurgent, anticolonial queer epistemologies, aesthetics, and affective expressions within dominant Arab media histories, playfully contorting queer’s habitual reduction to content into an expansive elaboration of form