STANDARD HEALTH CARE A closer look at race

A study published in the American Journal of Public Health estimates that failure to deliver standard care to blacks cost nearly 900,000 lives between 1991 and 2000. An important limitation of the study was that it looked only at mortality and did not examine the role increased illness or other factors (such as income, lifestyle and environment) may play in these outcomes. Some of the key measures reflecting greater rates of death and disease among blacks:
Blacks are twice as likely to have diabetes as whites, and they experience more complications from the disease. For example, diabetic blacks have kidney failure about four times more often than diabetic whites; diabetic retinopathy (an eye disease) is at least 40 percent more common in blacks than in whites.
About 40 percent of blacks have cardiovascular disease, compared with 30 percent of white men and 24 percent of white women. Blacks are 29 percent more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than whites.
Blacks have the highest prevalence of hypertension -- which increases the risk for heart disease and stroke -- among all racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Among people age 20 and older, about 42 percent of black men and 45 percent of black women have high blood pressure; 32 percent of white men and 30 percent of white women have it.
Blacks have almost twice the risk for a first stroke as whites; they are nearly 50 percent more likely to die from a stroke than whites.
Blacks are 23 percent more likely to die from cancer than whites. Black men die from prostate cancer at twice the rate of whites. Black women have a 30 percent higher death rate from breast cancer than white women.
Blacks are 10 times more likely to die from HIV/AIDS than whites. In 2001 the infant mortality rate for blacks was more than twice as high as for whites.
Sources: Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health's "Closing the Health Gap" campaign; American Cancer Society; American Heart Association