Environmental Health

We’re feeling very grateful for the wonderfully vibrant and dedicated community of migrant clinicians that we serve. Thank you for your hard work in the fight for health justice for the mobile poor! Our successes rely on your dedication to serving mobile populations around the country and beyond.

So, before we pull out the stuffing and gravy, we at MCN wanted to share an incredible year of successes in the world of migrant health. Here are our 2015 Health Justice Highlights, in the year so far:

We’ve had another very busy week at MCN. Here are some updates from the world of public health and health justice that we thought you’d enjoy, chosen by MCN staff members.

1. Claire, Writer and Editor: Tomorrow is World Diabetes Day, where we work to make healthy eating a right, not a privilege. Check out the World Diabetes Day website for more. 

This week, I joined Ricardo Garay, MCN’s Health Network Manager, and Theressa Lyons, MCN’s Training and Technical Assistance Coordinator, to represent MCN at the Midwest Stream Farmworker Health Forum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The annual Midwest Stream Forum, along with the East Coast Migrant Stream Forum and the Western Forum for Migrant and Community Health, bring clinicians together to discuss health issues at the forefront of migrant health.

Our fall issue of Streamline, our quarterly clinical publication, is hot off the presses! Download the new issue and view dozens of back issues here. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the content, in this video abstract produced by Tiffy Daud, our Graphic Designer. 

On Tuesday, MCN’s Juliana Simmons, MSPH, CHES, Environmental and Occupational Health Program Manager, attended a meeting hosted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Maryland Chapter and the Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility.

A presentation on the chronic effects of pediatric pesticide exposures by professor James Roberts, MD, MPH, FAAP was the highlight of the evening. Dr. Roberts is based at the Medical University of South Carolina and is a clinician partner of MCN.

MCN’s Amy Liebman, MPA, MA, Director of Environmental and Occupational Health, attended the 143rd American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting and Exposition in Chicago. Yesterday, Liebman presented “Policy exclusions and unequal protection for vulnerable workers.

This week, Amy Liebman, MPA, MA, Director of Environmental and Occupational Health at MCN, is in Washington, DC to serve on the Pesticide Program Dialogue Committee. Liebman is beginning her two-year term as a returning member of the federal advisory committee, which meets regularly with the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Pesticide Programs to discuss pesticide policies.

The final days of harvest have arrived for much of the country. The last sugar beets are being pulled out of the ground in North Dakota; apple harvest has a few more weeks in New York State. In California, the opposite is true. Slightly cooler weather in the Central Valley means farms are green with young plants to fill America’s plates through the winter.

This week, Homero Segovia, Migrant Clinicians Network’s Health Network Associate, tragically lost his life in a car accident. We at Migrant Clinicians Network struggled to keep working with the weight of this massive loss upon us. The trouble is, the work keeps piling up; all the momentum in the world of health justice hasn’t stopped (which, we know, is a positive thing). Next week, we will offer a blog post to commemorate Homero and his work at MCN.