Arizona is seeing more COVID-19 cases statewide, but two small counties along the US-Mexico border are seeing particularly troubling trends. In the last month, Santa Cruz county has reported over 1,500 new cases and Yuma County has reported more than 3,000. That’s a stark change from numbers those areas have...

When I grew up living near the U.S./Mexico border, the Tohono O’odham elders taught me that our sacred mountains and springs—as well as our most important spiritual ceremonies and pilgrimages—occur on both sides of the international boundary. We traveled to areas not knowing we were in another country, but knowing...

During the 1960-70’s, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) developed into the preeminent public health agency in the United States and the world.  Whenever a state health department or a foreign health ministry had an infectious disease problem on which they wanted assistance, they called on CDC.  Inherent in the...

Health officials on both sides of the Arizona-Mexico border are working jointly to combat a severe outbreak of COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, along the neighboring border communities of Yuma and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora. The number of confirmed positive cases has grown rapidly since the...

As COVID-19 raised its ugly head in the rural areas of Southwest borderlands this winter, I recalled the conditions among farmworkers described by Jeff Banister, now director of the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona, after he had spent days out in the heat with migratory farmworkers at the...