Zinzi Bailey

Neighborhood disadvantage and the incidence of dementia in US Black women INTRODUCTION We investigated the association of neighborhood disadvantage with the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) in the longitudinal Black Women's Health Study (BWHS).....

🚨 Our new @alzdemjournals.bsky.social paper on neighborhood disadvantage and dementia in in the Black Women's Health Study (BWHS). Honored to be part of this collaboration @bostonu.bsky.social @rushalzheimers.bsky.social & more
@beyoung40.bsky.social @zinzinator.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1002/alz....

Ambient outdoor heat and accelerated epigenetic aging among older adults in the US Ambient outdoor heat, especially long term, may accelerate epigenetic aging in a diverse national cohort of older adults.

Bad news: the beach that makes you old is real, and I'm sorry to say that it's climate change (h/t @torrelavelle.bsky.social) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

House Rs just passed the budget resolution, the first step in their process to enact a bill that'd kick millions off Medicaid & cut SNAP down to just $1.60 per person per meal on avg while cutting taxes for the top 0.1% by $278k - all while increasing the debt

🧵on what's to come and WHERE TO FIGHT

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

Tell me you're redlining without telling me you're redlining

JUST IN: A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the Trump administration's rate change to NIH grants.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Why does the world's richest man want to gut the CFPB?

Because it would shield him from having to follow financial laws to keep customers' money safe — and give him access to confidential records about his competitors.

Follow the money.

The hardest part about public health is that when we succeed, there's no crisis, no epidemic. People carry on with daily life, unaware of a near-miss. We may never know how bad it could have been - because our public health workforce is always taking action to avoid, prevent, and control threats.

ABA It has been three weeks since Inauguration Day. Most Americans recognize that newly elected leaders bring change. That is expected. But most Americans also expect that changes will take place in accordance with the rule of law and in an orderly manner that respects the lives of affected individuals and the work they have been asked to perform. Instead, we see wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself, such as attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship, the dismantling of USAID and the attempts to criminalize those who support lawful programs to eliminate bias and enhance diversity. We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law. There are efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit, and social media announcements that disparage and appear to be motivated by a desire to inflame without any stated factual basis. This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law. The American Bar Association supports the rule of law. That means holding governments, including our own, accountable under law. We stand for a legal process that is orderly and fair. We have consistently urged the administrations of both parties to adhere to the rule of law. We stand in that familiar place again today. And we do not stand alone. Our courts stand for the rule of law as well.

Someone at the American Bar Association ate their Wheaties this morning.

Every smart person I know is making quiet plans for a bird flu pandemic to spread human to human.
Business folks, medical doctors, public health folks- my network is preparing in big and small ways.
That is a privilege I want all of us to have.

Making sure everyone understands: Afrikaners—Elon Musk’s people—built, enforced, and thrived under the apartheid system they created. Not just “white-ruled segregation”—it was systemic racial oppression to keep the white minority in power.

They don’t deserve refugee status—they were the oppressors!

Me, a US based physician, going to Canada’s avian flu website to see what the latest data are.
Because our own scientific communication platforms have been severely compromised or shuttered.

In the year 2025. Never thought I’d see this day.

Anyhoo, link here: www.canada.ca/en/public-he...

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism - Boston Review A debate is roiling about the aptness of comparing Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

Black anti-fascists argued the Atlantic world’s history of racial violence belied the novelty of intra-European fascism. Speaking at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, Langston Hughes declared: “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know.”

Good advice for researchers who talk to news media about NIH funding cuts. No need to explain indirect cost recovery 👇

lord of the rings meme gimli i think idc: "never thought i'd die fighting side by side with an indirect cost rate" legolas but his face says 67.5%: "what about side by side with a friend?" same gimli: no dialogue

how it feels logging on today

Dear Fellow College Presidents: We Need to Do More Than Wait This One Out Why civil society needs university leaders to speak up.

From Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University: slate.com/life/2025/02...

Many are asking: “What can I do now?”

Here’s a revised and expanded list of actions you can take, in rough order of importance. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/more-on-what-you-can-do

Write as if the truth really matters (opinion) As both citizens and scholars, now is not the time to withdraw, Philip N. Cohen writes.

"Purging, or hiding, the 'Marxist maniacs and lunatics' in the faculty lounge won’t actually help, because they’re not the real target... the core problem is the modern worldview in which democratic principles of inclusive representation rest on a foundation of rational knowledge creation."

This was the motto of the civil society movement to resist Bolsonaro’s right wing authoritarianism in Brazil. I learned it from @annagalland.bsky.social and love it. Would love to see American designers do their own interpretations.

Good perspective for this coming week

Tesla paid $0 in federal income tax last year.

2022: $0
2021: $0
2020: $0
2019: $0
2018: $0

Tesla reported $6.7 billion in profit in those years.

Find information on the economic impact the NIH has on your state. bsky.app/profile/stan...

I have a confession
.
.
.
I was an “overhead cost”.

I was a beaker washer, agar plate pourer, research secretary. I was paid by “overhead cost” fees. Loved it.

Those “overhead cost” jobs allowed this rural kid to become a physician.

Please tag how #OverheadCostJob impact u.

This is certainly more than an attack on what this administration refers to as "DEI". And I think we (collectively) have to be worried about the construction of our narrative.

I truly appreciate your efforts. The intention is not to be uncharitable. That middle paragraph -- perhaps just in wording -- seems to articulate unspoken sentiments from colleagues and university administrators.

No doubt the way it is rolling out is intended to completely hamstring us and force us into horrible decisions. But if we're enacting this kind of narrative, the other side has already won. Sacrifices have already been identified.

The question is how can move forward in solidarity?

3/

The idea of a research enterprise -- a university -- that is not equitable, at the very least in principle, is not one I want to invest in.

2/

While I appreciate your main points, this one is unnecessarily and problematically dismissive of the war against an equitable research enterprise. From this narrative, what I hear is that people of color, those with disabilities, LGBTQI+ are expendable for the sake of institutions.

1/

Elon Musk wants to cut government spending. Tesla and SpaceX benefit from it Over the last 16 years, Musk's business deals with the government total nearly $20 billion, according to federal contracting data.

DOGE plans to slash about as much ($4B) from NIH, and hence from universities and medical centers, as the government gave SpaceX ($3.8B) last year.

It's not about the money and government "waste."

It's never been about the money or government "waste."

www.usatoday.com/story/money/...