Living While Black/O, the Tribune

[Is this breast black or white?]

For a while, there's been the term DWB--Driving While Black--African-American drivers report being pulled over for this offense. Now we're finding out (again) that it's dangerous to be LWB, especially in Chicago. Today's Tribune reports on a study that showed that the African-American death rate from breast cancer in 2005 was 99 percent higher in Chicago than for white women, a fivefold increase since 1990.
This is not new. Chicago Magazine reported on this a couple of years ago, or a version of this--a previous study by the same researchers at the Sinai Urban Health Institute. The same bad news: Chicago is worse than other cities. The gap between black and white health here is widening. The Trib is careful to quote an African-American doctor who partly blames the victim--the problem is partly lifestyle, she says; partly it's poverty; and partly lack of knowledge about health.
Hmm, says Cancer Bitch to herself, why is it that this is the only person in the story who's identified by race? Could it be that everyone else quoted is "normal," i.e., white, and so doesn't have to be identified?
The health study was published online yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health, the Tribune avers. It identifies Steve Whitman (no race), director of the Sinai Urban Health Institute as the author of the study. The conclusion drawn from the study, according to the journal abstract: Overall, progress toward meeting the Healthy People 2010 goal of eliminating health disparities in the United States and in Chicago remains bleak. With more than 15 years of time and effort spent at the national and local level to reduce disparities, the impact remains negligible.
You can find the abstract of the piece here. You can get the article for 30 bucks from the AJPH site.
Along these same lines, but even more depressing: A Rush University Medical Center study published in November showed that Chicago's black and white breast cancer mortality rates were the same in 1980. This was also in the Chicago Magazine story. From that piece, by Shane Trisch:
We've arranged things in this country so that the darker your skin, the shorter your life will be--Steve Whitman.

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Stop the Presses!!

Today the Tribune informed us (this being Holy Holy Pink Breast Cancer Month) that black women in Chicago die more often of breast cancer than white women do. And that the reason is--get this!--that black women are more likely to live in poverty and therefore to have less access to good health care.

This is news?

To whom might this be a surprise? Perhaps people who thought there might be parity in health care in the US, for some reason. Or people who thought Chicago was like New York City, which has clinics scattered more evenly around the city. The Trib tells us: "The racial gap in Chicago was twice that of the United States and sevenfold that of New York City." This would not be a surprise to anyone who read Shane Tritsch's fine piece a year ago in Chicago magazine on the "Deadly Difference."

I think the best way to improve health care in the US as well as education is: make everyone rich. Then everything else will follow. We could start be spreading the wealth of this bailout. And throw in the money that the Iraq war is costing every day, in people and materiel and after-effects.

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