http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963
The result is not that surprising. Here is part of the abstract:
[url=<a href=“http://fusion.net/story/128844/if-black-america-were-a-country/%5DHere’s%5B/url”>http://fusion.net/story/128844/if-black-america-were-a-country/]Here’s[/url] another story in this vein in which Felix Salmon (a favorite writer of mine) links to an Economist chart that shows US life expectancy and then that separately as white and black Americans. Felix includes a few other indicators all of which show a massive gap. I have a bunch more.
For reference, black America is much more similar on health measures to the West Bank and Gaza, meaning Palestine. And by contrast, Arab Israelis do substantially better on every measure of health and do better economically relative to Jewish Israelis than black Americans do to white Americans. (And I’m including the Bedouin, though their health outcomes are distorted by way too much kin marriage, meaning high rates of birth defects, more infant mortality, etc.) I mention this because so much attention is paid to discrimination in Israel, particularly on college campuses, and yet America only seems to care about discrimination against black Americans when the police kill a bunch and then only as an issue of law and order and police policies. As an example, I noted more articles in the US press about access to bus routes in Israel for Arab villages than access to bus routes in the US for black communities though unemployment in our actual country is a real problem.
Have you read the articles lately about the decline in Iife expectancy for uneducated white women?
We knew diabetes mellitus was a racist disease 30 years ago but the rates still continue to climb.
Rural (white) Appalachia also has poorer health measures. It’s important to separate out the impacts of poverty and the impacts of race.
Obesity is highly correlated to poverty. The offshoots of obesity (diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc) are pretty brutal.
I don’t think it is as much racism as it is poverty (I am deliberately leaving out the argument that the poverty is caused by racism, that is a different discussion). One of the problems with studies like this, where it looks at overall populations, is that it is comparing all economic levels, so a well off white family is lumped in with a poor white family living in a place like Appalachia, and it skews results. Given the fact that the poverty rate is much higher among blacks than among whites ie that a lot more whites are relatively well off economically, it is not surprising that the study would show the outcomes it does, if a larger percentage of the black population is in poverty or near poverty, I would expect health issues to be a lot more.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to figure out why. Smoking, for example, is a lot more prevalent in poor communities, tobacco companies target poorer communities and there is a lot less effort made there with things like anti smoking initiatives. Health care is also a lot more problematic in poor areas, especially poor rural areas, and things that are routinely treated in more well off areas often go untreated, partly because of things like lack of health insurance, partly because medical care isn’t available. Drug abuse is a lot more common in poorer communities, and that takes it toll. Then, too, a big factor is that the diet of poorer people tends to be unhealthy, relying on fast food, on things like processed canned foods and such, because it is a lot cheaper than eating healthy (not to mention that information on healthy eating is not always so readily available to poorer people). I remember reading something that said among the rural poor it was slightly better, because they would supplement their food by hunting and fishing and having gardens, something people in more urban or suburban areas would not have access to, but even that is spotty. I remember talking to folks when I belonged to an Episcopal church about a mission trip to appalachia, and they said what they saw among many families is they were eating things like white bread and cheap sugary cereal to survive, that their diet often lacked fruit and vegetables, were more loaded with empty carbs because where they lived, that was a cheap way to eat.
There is another factor, things like waste treatment plants, factories, highways and other sources of contaminants are often located in poorer areas, when it comes to NIMBY poor areas have little power. So rates of things like asthma, emphysema, lead poisoning and the like have always been associated with poor areas (before they finally removed lead from gasoline, areas around the highways that they tended to (not surprisingly) run through poor, inner city areas, had larger than normal rates of kids with cognitive and other issues attributable to exposure to lead, between that and lead paint that had not been dealt with, it was almost an epidemic).
Add all that up, and I would bet that the direct correlation is poverty, it would be interesting to compare how poor whites fair against blacks in the same economic situation, would bet there might be a gap, but it wouldn’t be as significant as comparing total populations.
Perhaps if you are focusing on finding news about Israel all the time, but it does seem that news about Israel has receded generally in US media, due to less immediate relationship between Israeli and US politics (e.g. Netanyahu lobbying the US Congress, the Israeli Knesset election and speculated effect on relations between Israel (seems like the messy process of post-election coalition building in Israel does not interest people or media in the US), the US, and other countries, etc.).
Smoking rates are also considerably higher among LGBT people, including younger people with much higher rates than their non-LGBT peers. It’s not hard to speculate on why that might be.
I have not read this particular study but I want to comment on the ethnicity vs poverty issue. Yes, absolutely poverty is a bigger factor than race/ethnicity. However, at every level of SES and education, blacks and other minority groups (except most Asians) suffer significantly worse health outcomes.
I am most familiar with maternal health outcomes and even among high income, highly educated Black women and children, the maternal and infant health outcomes are atrocious compared to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the global north.
I am most familiar with maternal health outcomes and even among high income, highly educated Black women and children, the maternal and infant health outcomes are atrocious compared to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the global north.*
I’ve worked with high risk women during and after their pregnancies, and a huge stumbling block is a belief that pregnancy does not warrant seeking medical care until delivery is imminent. Lack of education is a factor in accessing health care, as is limited English. Rural women also have reduced access to health care, not only while pregnant, but before.
http://www.astho.org/Programs/Health-Equity/Maternal-and-Infant-Disparities-Issue-Brief/
Women who themselves were premature, are at higher risk to give birth early, so impact is multigenerational.
Obesity, as noted above, is a major factor in preterm birth, after removing coexisting illnesses as diabetes & pre eclampsia.
Dunno. Why? Because society tries to marginalize them?
I knew schizophrenics have a higher rate of nicotine dependence, but I had not heard anything about GLBT youth.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/06/smoking.aspx
I’ve always thought cigarettes, and the associated chemicals * increase stress*, not decrease it.
Not to mention the impact on lung capacity!
However the behavior of removing yourself from the surrounding area and focusing on something , in this case, a cigarette, may help the immediate perception of stress, while it increases overall reactivity.
Some people have been working on this issue for a while:
http://www.nationalcollaborative.org/sites/default/files/Flyer.Panel%20on%20Health%20Disparities.pdf
IIRC Brian Smedley’s PhD was on the disparity in AIDS treatment due to race, done in the late 1980s, and testified before Congress.
JustOneDad, that’s basically my theory – it’s the added stress. My son (who’s gay) smokes, unfortunately (although not much), and just about all his lesbian and gay friends do as well, whereas almost none of his straight friends smokes.
I smoked myself for almost 15 years, until before my son was born, but the reason I started had a lot more to do with being a first-year law student whose mother had just died that summer, than with being LGBT.
Big tobacco has also sponsored ads and events for the LGBT community, trying to garner more customers among them. LBGT and mentally ill population both have very high percentages of smokers, which has been well documented in the literature. Minorities are also targetted by big tobacco as customers, with huge ad campaigns.
Hmmm, the set of smokers I know does not seem to intersect with the set of L/G people I know. But that may have to do with (a) being in a region that has been smoking-unfriendly for a while (few smokers to begin with), and (b) the L/G people being in either mainly high-SES social circles (less smoking) or social circles focused on sports (smoking is undesirable due to its effect on sports performance). Are your son’s L/G friends and straight friends otherwise in different kinds of social circles where the differences correlate to smoking tendencies?
Yes, it is true that, in general, LGBT people smoke more than others. But the difference overall is not as large as “just about all” versus “almost none” (see http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/resources/data/cigarette-smoking-in-united-states.html and http://www.thedccenter.org/facts_smoking.html ).
It’s hard to generalize LGBT populations as though all those represented by those letters have similar behaviors. For example, yes all LGBT groups are more likely to smoke than their straight counterparts but gay men are only slightly more likely to smoke whereas lesbians are up to 350% more likely to smoke than their straight, female counterparts. I do not know the rates of trans individuals off the top of my head (and, indeed, I’m not even sure if they exist).
One of the reasons you see lower numbers quoted for LGBT smoking rates is that, until recently, gay men were used as representatives of the whole spectrum of LGBT+ folks.
Even accounting for the lower smoking rate of women overall compared to men overall, that does seem like lesbians are far more likely to smoke than gay men and that the majority or close to majority of lesbians smoke. Is it known why this is the case?
I’m not sure- not really my area of research. I only know about this because I briefly worked in the same lab as someone who was researching this.
I’d research the work of Michelle Johns and go from there if you’re curious. She’s the only person I know of off the top of my head who works exclusively with sexual minority women rather than lumping them in with MSM.