Last week, Patricia Juárez-Carrillo, PhD, MPH, passed away at the age of 63 from pulmonary fibrosis. Patricia was a longtime collaborator and consultant for Migrant Clinicians Network, a close colleague to many on MCN’s staff, an effective advocate for migrant and immigrant health, and a dear friend.
“She was a fun and positive friend and colleague to work with, and she made significant contributions to the health of the migrant community, both at the US-Mexico border and overall,” said Alma Galván, MHC, MCN's Senior Program Manager, who has worked with Patricia for almost three decades, beginning with collaborations at the US-Mexico border, where both worked for a community development organization that addressed health throughout Mexico. In the intervening years, Patricia, Alma, and Amy K. Liebman, MPH, MCN's Director of Environmental and Occupational Health, would work closely at several organizations pursuing health and environmental justice and equity for immigrants and migrants, including an award-winning hygiene education program called Agua Para Beber, one of the first environmental health projects that relied on promotores de salud, building on successful promotores programs in Mexico and elsewhere worldwide. Patricia began to work on projects with MCN by the mid-90s. Some of MCN's most popular and enduring low-literacy resources were co-created with Patricia, including the comic book on pesticides, Aunque Cerca... Sano.
“Patricia was tireless in her devotion to the community and in her unwavering insistence to weave in scholarly excellence and best practices into every product and project she worked on. She loved learning, whether it was from workers or community members or from peer reviewed journal articles and researchers,” Amy said. “But what I remember most about Patricia was her kindness and her wit, which made working on any project fun even when the hours were long and when the work seemed endless.”
Most recently, Patricia joined Amy to develop a suite of materials on dairy farm safety, including a bilingual picture dictionary, comic book, and full training curriculum. This project was part of the Upper Midwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center (UMASH) and it was recognized with an award by the National Safety Council for its collaborative research approach. Patricia was the lead author on a research paper detailing the efforts, on which Amy was co-author. The paper, entitled “Applying Learning Theory to Safety and Health Training for Hispanic Immigrant Dairy Workers [2],” and which was also translated into Spanish, was honored with the Paper of the Year award from the Society for Public Health (SOPHE).
To celebrate her life's work, here we offer many of the resources to which she contributed here at MCN.
This manual on pesticides informs community health workers and parents about ways to protect their children from pesticide exposures.
Aunque Cerca…Sano [4] Comic Book
This low-literacy engaging Spanish-language comic book on pesticides informs community workers and parents about ways to protect their children from pesticide exposures.
Lo que bien empieza…bien acaba [5] Comic Book
This Spanish-language comic book aims to reduce the risk of pesticide exposures in women of reproductive age.
Seguridad en las lecherías [6] Project
Seguridad en las lecherías is a health and safety intervention for immigrant workers in dairy. Learn more about this UMASH project and access all the resources on our Dairy Worker Safety page [6]. Some of the materials from the Seguridad project include:
• The bilingual graphic dictionary, Seguridad en palabras/Safety in Words, illustrates risks in the workplace and the best health and safety practices in agriculture.
• Trabajas con animals en un rancho/Working with Farm Animals is a comic book about how to prevent zoonotic diseases, available in English [7] and Spanish [8].
Poco veneno… No mata? [9] Manual
A manual for lay health educators or health promoters that helps with community education activities about pesticides.
Poco veneno… No mata? [10] Comic Book
This comic book discusses pesticides and chemicals used at home.
A GoFundMe has been set up in Patricia’s honor to start the Dr. Patricia Juarez-Carrillo Memorial Fund. Learn more about the fund and donate here [11].
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