Publications by authors named "J Zelner"
Disparities in coronavirus disease 2019 mortality are driven by inequalities in group-specific incidence rates (IRs), case fatality rates (CFRs), and their interaction. For emerging infections, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, group-specific IRs and CFRs change on different time scales, and inequities in these measures may reflect different social and medical mechanisms. To be useful tools for public health surveillance and policy, analyses of changing mortality rate disparities must independently address changes in IRs and CFRs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWorkplace Exposures Vary Across Neighborhoods in the US: Implications on Social Vulnerability and Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities.
J Racial Ethn Health Disparities
August 2024
Ignoring workplace exposures that occur beyond the local residential context in place-based risk indices like the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) likely misclassifies community exposure by under-counting risks and obscuring true drivers of racial/ethnic health disparities. To investigate this hypothesis, we developed several place-based indicators of occupational exposure and examined their relationships with race/ethnicity, SVI, and health inequities. We used publicly available job exposure matrices and employment estimates from the United States (US) Census to create and map six indicators of occupational hazards for every census tract in the US.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOccupational and residential segregation and other manifestations of social and economic inequity drive of racial and socioeconomic inequities in infection, severe disease, and death from a wide variety of infections including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, HIV, tuberculosis, and many others. Despite a deep and long-standing quantitative and qualitative literature on infectious disease inequity, mathematical models that give equally serious attention to the social and biological dynamics underlying infection inequity remain rare. In this paper, we develop a simple transmission model that accounts for the mechanistic relationship between residential segregation on inequity in infection outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Laboratory networks determine whether to test onsite or send specimens to higher-tier labs based on testing, treatment, and epidemiological factors.
- The study created a decision model analyzing the advantages of onsite versus send-out testing, using tuberculosis as a key example.
- Findings suggest onsite testing is preferred when delays in send-out result in significant clinical utility losses, while cost and testing accuracy also influence decision-making.
Article Synopsis
- The Flint Water Crisis was a preventable public health disaster that predominantly impacted Black residents in Flint, highlighting systemic issues of racism.
- A study analyzing nearly six million tweets related to Flint revealed a significant increase in mentions of race and racism as the crisis unfolded, correlating with major developments and increased media coverage.
- Sentiment analysis indicated that tweets discussing race tended to have a more negative tone, suggesting a real-time public connection between the crisis events and racial issues, which could inform discussions about health disparities among minorities in the U.S.