The
Future Is Now: Eliminating Health Disparities in Oregon.
April 10-11, Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel. To register,
call Portland Community College at 731-6633
For
more information about health disparities in Oregon, visit
www.healthoregon.
org/chs/race.htm.
For
more information about the federal government's efforts
to reduce health disparities, visit raceandhealth.hhs.gov.
According to figures from the state Health Division, Oregon's
minorities, particularly African Americans, Native Americans
and Hispanics, die younger and live more miserably than
its white population.
This morbid inequality has been around so long that many
Oregonians have been lulled into complacency, but the
issue may soon gain a higher profile, thanks to an upcoming
visit by the nation's top doctor.
"For all the medical breakthroughs we have seen in the
past century, we still see significant disparities in
the medical conditions of racial groups in this country,"
says U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher, who will
deliver the keynote address at a national conference next
week on multicultural health, which will focus on the
yawning disparities in mortality and morbidity among Oregon's
minorities.
For black Oregonians, the risk of death in any given
year is 36 percent higher than for whites. They are 7.5
times more likely to be murdered; 3.6 times more likely
to succumb to a fatal drug overdose; 2.8 times more likely
to perish from diabetes; 2.5 times more likely to contract
AIDS; and 2.2 times more likely to die of alcoholism.
"It's disturbing that these disparities exist in a very
wealthy economy," says state Sen. Avel Gordly, a Portland
Democrat, who will also speak at the conference. "We have
whole communities that are being left behind when it comes
to the quality of health care available to them."
The stubborn persistence of the "health gap" has public
health officials fuming. Asked to identify the most glaring
example of the disparity, Oregon's state epidemiologist,
Dr. David Fleming, emits an audible sigh before explaining
that so many conditions are involved it's impossible to
list them. "We're not talking about a single health problem,"
he says. "One of our priorities has to be to correct these
disparities."
In 1998, Satcher and President Clinton launched an initiative
to eliminate racial disparities in health by the year
2010. Last year Gov. John Kitzhaber, himself a former
practicing MD, created a Racial and Ethnic Health Task
Force to find ways to improve minority health.
If Oregon's figures are anything to go by, it will be
a Herculean task, particularly when it comes to leveling
the Great Leveler. Death is the ultimate measure of a
population's health, reflecting the complex interplay
of factors such as poverty, lifestyle, education, access
to medical care, quality of medical care and environmental
exposure. These are hardly problems to be solved at the
waving of a wand, but what really galls public-health
experts is that many minority deaths are to some degree
preventable: lung cancer, diabetes, unintentional injury
and AIDS.
Race also plays a disturbing role in the likelihood of
surviving certain diseases. Last year, researchers at
the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center reported that
only 64 percent of black lung-cancer patients received
potentially life-saving surgery, compared to 77 percent
of white patients. As a result, far fewer blacks survived
five years after diagnosis (26 percent, versus 34 percent
of whites).
A similar study by researchers at the University of Northern
Iowa reported that breast cancer is typically diagnosed
much later and tends to be more lethal in black women
than in white women. Five-year survival was 77 percent
for black women and 84 percent for white women.
In general, Oregon's mortality rates reflect national
trends, but there are some striking differences. Oregon's
black population has the highest rate of drug deaths in
the nation (210 percent higher than the national average),
the third-highest rate of death from alcoholism (41 percent
higher) and the fourth-highest rate of death from cerebrovascular
disease (27 percent higher). Statisticians say state-to-state
comparisons should be interpreted cautiously, however,
because Oregon has more stringent reporting requirements
than other states.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 5,
2000
