United States

Professor Ndola Prata's exceptional undergraduate students from the PH181 course Poverty and Population this fall semester have communicated with their United States representatives!

December 18, 2025

This fall 2025 semester Professor Ndola Prata has six exceptional undergraduate students from the PH181 course Poverty and Population who have communicated with their United States representatives, expressing their strong arguments for contraceptives as foreign aid for USAID, comprehensive sex education in public schools, abortion pills, community protection from hunger and climate stress, food security and women's access to reproductive care. These students are Rishabh Ganesh Balamitran, Raka Bose, Alyssa Chan, Rosalie Güitrón,...

Quality of top webpages providing abortion pill information for Google searches in the USA: An evidence-based webpage quality assessment

Ndola Prata
Karen Weidert
Sylvia Guendelman
Elizabeth Pleasants
2025

Background

In the United States, the internet is widely used to seek health information. Despite an estimated 18 million Google searches on abortion per year and the demonstrated importance of the abortion pill as an option for pregnancy termination, the top webpage search results for abortion pill searches, as well as the content and quality of those webpages, are not well understood.

Methods
We used Google’s Custom Search Application Programming Interface (API) to identify the top 10 webpages presented for “abortion pill” searches on...

Using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to Access Google Data and Gain Insights Into Searches on Birth Control in Louisiana and Mississippi, 2014-2018: Infoveillance Study

Ndola Prata
Karen Weidert
Anne Zepecki
Elina Yon
Elizabeth Pleasants
Petrice Sams-Abiodun
Sylvia Guendelman
2025

Background: It is now common to search for health information online. A 2013 Pew Research Center survey found that 77% of online health seekers began their query at a search engine. The widespread use of online health information seeking also applies to women’s reproductive health. Despite online interest in birth control, not much is known about related interests and concerns reflected in the search terms in the United States.

Objective: In this study, we identify the top search terms on Google related to birth control in Louisiana and Mississippi and compare those results to the...

Abortion access barriers shared in “r/abortion” after Roe: a qualitative analysis of a Reddit community post-Dobbs decision leak in 2022

Karen Weidert
Lindsay Parham
Ndola Prata
Ushma Upadhyay
Elizabeth Pleasants
Eliza Dolgins
Emma Anderson
Coye Cheshire
Cassondra Marshall
2025

With drastic changes to abortion policy, the months following the Dobbs leak and subsequent decision in 2022 were a uniquely uncertain and difficult time for abortion access in the United States. To understand experiences of challenges to abortion access during that time, we used a hybrid inductive and
deductive thematic coding approach to analyse descriptions of barriers and their impacts shared in an abortion subreddit (r/abortion). A simple random sample of 10% of posts was obtained from those shared from 02 May 2022 through 23 December 2022; comments were purposively sampled during...

Behavioral Innovations to Access Abortion Post-Dobbs: A Qualitative Thematic Analysis of Reddit’s r/abortion Community in 2022

Eliza Dolgins
Lindsay Parham
Karen Weidert
Emma Anderson
Coye Cheshire
Ndola Prata
Elizabeth Pleasants
2025

Following the leak of the Dobbs decision in 2022, abortion access in the United States has faced heightened barriers, including legal restrictions, financial constraints, and logistical challenges. In response, individuals seeking abortion care can employ innovative behavioral strategies to overcome these barriers and reshape their abortion experiences (ie, “behavioral innovations”). This paper explores the behavioral innovations to access abortion that people discussed and recommended within a geographically dispersed community of peers on an abortion-supportive Reddit community (r/...

Have Others Had This Experience? A Qualitative Analysis of Posts on Self-Managed Abortion to US-Based Reddit Community

Karen Weidert
Ndola Prata
Lindsay Parham
Eliza Dolgins
Emma Anderson
Elizabeth Pleasants
2025

Objectives: Limiting abortion within the formal health care system is associated with more self-managed abortion (SMA). Reddit is a publicly available social networking site that allows users to create and join communities (“subreddits”) around a specific topic. R/abortion is a subreddit dedicated to providing support and advice to people seeking or having an abortion. The purpose of this study is to analyze r/abortion data after the Dobbs leak in 2022 to explore SMA access and use experiences shared in the community.

Methods: We employed a hybrid qualitative thematic analysis...

Our recent collaborative publication will be featured in IJERPH's highly selective "Editor's Choice Articles" special edition

December 8, 2025
The Impact of Air Quality on Patient Mortality: A National Study Utilizing 6.6 million patient records from the American Family Cohort (AFC) dataset, we investigated the impact of air quality on five-year mortality. We found that patients in the group with an Air Quality Index (AQI) > 50 had an adjusted hazard of death that was 4.02 times higher than those in the group with AQI < 50. This increased hazard was...

The Impact of Air Quality on Patient Mortality: A National Study

Ndola Prata, MD, MSc
Isabella Chu
Marie Diener-West
Divya Periyakoil
2025

INTRODUCTION


Air pollution is a risk factor for a variety of cardiopulmonary diseases and
is a contributing factor to cancer, diabetes, and cognitive impairment. The impact on
mortality is not clearly elucidated. Objectives: The goal of this study is to determine the
impact (if any) of air pollution on the 5-year mortality of patients in the American Family
Cohort (AFC) dataset. Methods: The AFC dataset is derived from the American Board of
Family Medicine PRIME Registry electronic health record data. It includes longitudinal
information from 6.6 million unique...

Ndola Prata's undergraduate student exceptional communications!

December 5, 2024

Victoria Lee, Drexler Anthony T. Madamba, Kendy Mendoza, and Hazel Warner, undergraduate students from Ndola Prata's PH181 course, Poverty and Population, have been in touch with Congressional Representatives in Washington DC, Journalist Alisha Haridasani Gupta (New York Times) and Governor Inslee (Washington). Click here to read the students' exceptional work!

Film Screening October 24, 2023: Plan C abortion pill access in the US and a Q&A with PLAN C Director Tracy Droz Tragos

October 12, 2023
The Wallace Center for MCAH and the Bixby Center present: Plan C: A documentary on abortion pill access in the U.S. Screened October 24, 2023 at 2121 Berkeley Way, BWW Building, Berkeley, CA 94720

RSVP here...