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The Special Populations at Risk Team is involved in a number of projects aimed at promoting new methods and approaches for addressing the occupational health of populations that are frequently under-represented in traditional occupational health research including young and old workers, immigrant and minority workers, and disabled workers. The team sponsored sessions at the October 2000 National Occupational Injury Research Symposium (NOIRS) in Pittsburgh and at the annual American Public Health Association (APHA) meeting in Boston in November 2000. In addition, the team sponsored a symposium in August 2000 for NIOSH researchers. The symposium addressed the interaction between race, socio-economic status, and occupational health outcomes among minorities with disproportionate rates of unemployment and underemployment. During the past year, the team has begun an initiative to develop a research agenda for low income, immigrant, and minority workers. This effort builds on the initiatives undertaken by other parts of CDC and other health researchers to develop a better research base to address the well-documented health disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States. This year NIOSH partnered with several National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes to fund a series of research grants aimed at addressing these issues. Three grants totaling more than $1.5 million per year for 5 years were awarded to researchers to address health disparities resulting from occupational exposures. The Special Populations at Risk Team will be working with these researchers and other intramural and extramural researchers around the country to better define the challenges and new directions for research to address the needs of these hard-to-reach populations. Additionally, the team is initiating an effort to collaborate with researchers around the country to better coordinate and compare data on diverse low income immigrant and minority working populations. The research track at the annual Migrant Stream Forum meeting, established by NORA team members, is in its fourth year. The research listserv, a direct outgrowth of this effort, has proven extremely successful. |
