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Miyashita Ochoa on History of Discriminatory Blood Donation Ban

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Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Ayako Miyashita Ochoa wrote an article in the Regulatory Review about the inconsistencies between current blood donation deferral policies and modern scientific knowledge. At the height of the HIV epidemic, the FDA implemented a blood donation deferral for all men who have had sex with men in the last year. Miyashita Ochoa explained that, “at the time, exercising extreme caution was the wisest course of action” since scientists didn’t know how the virus was transmitted. However, the policy continued for decades, even as scientists learned more about HIV transmission and improved blood screening techniques. In April 2020, the FDA decreased the deferral period from 12 months to three months. While this was a step in the right direction, “it does not reflect the latest science,” Miyashita Ochoa said. She called on the United States to address HIV and gay-related stigma. “The FDA’s policies must harness truths based on science rather than fear.”

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Cohen Highlights Trauma of Involuntary Commitments

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Research by Social Welfare Professor David Cohen was cited in a Cut article about the legal consequences for individuals deemed mentally ill in the United States. Britney Spears’ conservatorship has highlighted the way that psychiatric diagnoses can be used to strip individuals of their rights to voting, medical decision-making, financial decisions and more. Cohen’s research shows that patient privacy laws and lack of data collection pertaining to human rights violations of the mentally ill make it difficult to estimate exactly how many people have experienced involuntary commitment. Last year, a study by Cohen found that involuntary commitments over the previous decade outpaced population growth three to one, and another estimate extrapolated that over 1 million Americans a year are involuntarily committed. “This is the most controversial intervention in mental health — you’re deprived of liberty, can be traumatized and then stigmatized — yet no one could tell how often it happens in the United States,” Cohen said.

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Monkkonen on Reversing the Legacy of Segregation

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the persistence of racial segregation in Los Angeles and other major U.S. cities. New research has found that many regions of the U.S. were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990. Reversing the legacy of segregation is a slow process, said Monkkonen, director of the Latin American Cities Initiative at UCLA Luskin. “It’s a self-perpetuating process, where people are relegated to less attractive parts of the city, and then they’re associated with those parts of the city,” he said. There are also stark disparities in income, home values and life expectancy between residents in segregated communities and those in more integrated areas. Monkkonen said that, while some communities are working to develop proactive policies around fair housing and development, many researchers aren’t convinced that 2020’s reckoning with race will significantly move the needle when it comes to segregation.

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Reservations Need More Federal Funding, Akee Says

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Associate Professor of Public Policy Randall Akee was featured in a Los Angeles Times article about the federal government’s failure to address the need for clean water and sanitation on Native American reservations. “Federal funding for reservations is not meeting needs,” Akee said. “It’s just woefully underfunded at the federal level, and tribes for a long, long time have not had the resources to fully develop these resources themselves.” Many Native American households lack indoor plumbing, and they often must rely on donations of drinking water when pipes fail. The government has deemed many of the necessary sanitation improvement projects “infeasible” because of the high cost, leaving rural indigenous communities with limited access to clean drinking water. “Frankly, it’s a responsibility of the federal government, a trust responsibility of treaties and hundreds of years of commitments,” Akee said. “There has been a failure to fully live up to those commitments.”

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Miyashita Ochoa on Outdated Blood Ban for Gay Men

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Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Ayako Miyashita Ochoa spoke to North Carolina Health News about policies that continue to bar some gay men from donating blood. Miyashita Ochoa explained that at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, there was no test for HIV or AIDS, and scientists weren’t sure how it was transmitted. “The policy itself was a reflection of that,” she said. “It also obviously targeted specifically the populations that were hardest hit by HIV and AIDS.” Over time, the policies endured despite advances in science. Miyashita Ochoa pointed out that a lot has changed since the 1980s, including what we know about HIV transmission and the efficacy of prevention measures. To combat a shortage in the blood supply caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA relaxed restrictions in 2020 to include men who have not had sex with men for three months. Advocates, however, argue for an end to all bans of gay and bisexual men.

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Torres-Gil on Reconstructing the Social Safety Net

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Professor of Social Welfare and Public Policy Fernando Torres-Gil was featured in a Next Avenue article about COVID-19 and the future of aging. Torres-Gil spoke at the Milken Institute 2021 Future of Health Summit, which focused on ageism, technology, the impact of COVID-19 on older adults, and solving social issues with an intergenerational approach. “I’d like to think that the pandemic is pushing us, forcing us to reframe, redefine and reconfigure what kind of society we want,” Torres-Gil said. “One of the great silver linings is that we began to realize that everyone matters and we need and want to reconstruct both the social safety net and its social contract.” After observing ableism and ageism during the pandemic, Torres-Gil said that one of the great challenges for society will be informing and educating young people to stop seeing elderly and disabled people as expendable and realize that they, too, will grow old someday.

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Cohen on the Disempowerment of Patients

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Professor of Social Welfare David Cohen was featured on the Mikhaila Peterson podcast as a guest speaker on the dangers of psychiatric medication, dependency and withdrawal. Cohen pointed out that the prescription rates for psychoactive drugs have quintupled in North America in the last 40 years. Prescriptions for children have increased even more, even though the long-term effects of psychoactive drug use not fully understood. “No one seems to be responsibly investigating these questions, despite the large number of citizens who take psychoactive drugs,” Cohen said. While psychoactive drug use is not new, the avalanche of modern synthesized psychotropics and corporate pharmaceutical promotion have served as converging factors increasing societal dependence on psychoactive drugs. “The cautions that we might feel as ordinary citizens about long-term use are short-circuited by the ideas that many of us are deficient or suffer from some pre-existing brain abnormality that requires treatment with drugs,” he said.

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Cohen Highlights Gaps in Psychiatric Hospitalization Data

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Professor of Social Welfare David Cohen was cited in a MedPage Today article about knowledge gaps in literature surrounding youth psychiatric admissions. A recent study in the United Kingdom found that youth with certain mental health diagnoses, including substance abuse and intellectual disability — as well as youth who were Black or of an older age group — were more likely to experience involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. However, data on youth mental health treatment and hospitalization in the United States is lacking and often not available to researchers. Laws on involuntary psychiatric holds for children and teenagers vary by state. Cohen pointed out that of the 25 states in the U.S. that have publicly available data on psychiatric commitments, only five states have released any data on youth. Collecting and sharing more data on psychiatric treatment and hospitalization of minors is recommended to better understand the impact of these detentions and the populations they affect most.

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Shah Promotes Healthy Behavior Among Adolescents

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Public Policy Professor Manisha Shah authored an article in the Conversation about her work to improve adolescent sexual and reproductive health in Tanzania. Adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa experience high rates of HIV infection, unintended teenage pregnancy and intimate partner violence. While many reproductive health programs and services focus exclusively on females, Shah and her team developed a program to encourage adolescent boys and young men to make better choices around their sexual and reproductive health through sports programming. They also focused on empowering adolescent girls and young women to make healthy, informed decisions by using goal-setting exercises. The study found that both the men’s soccer league and the goal-setting activity for women reduced intimate partner violence and increased adolescents’ sense of personal agency to make better choices around sexual relationships. Shah concluded that “offering contraception alone, without focusing on behavior change for females and males, won’t necessarily improve sexual and reproductive health for adolescents.”

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Blood Donation Ban Fueled by Fear, Not Science, Miyashita Ochoa Says

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Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Ayako Miyashita Ochoa was featured in a Men’s Health article discussing the impact of the longstanding ban on blood donations from gay men. The country’s blood supply is running dangerously low, partly due to the cancellation of many blood drives during the pandemic. Gay and bisexual men, often referred to as men who have sex with men (MSM), are not allowed to give blood if they have had sex with another man in the past three months. A 2014 report by the Williams Institute at UCLA found that allowing MSM equal access to donating blood could increase the total annual blood supply by 2% to 4%, which would help save the lives of more than a million people. Miyashita Ochoa expressed frustration that the ban still has not been lifted. “It is my opinion that we continue to have a real problem with laws and regulations based on fear rather than science,” she said.

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