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American Journal of Public Health December 2004 Highlights
- Eliminating racial disparities would save many more lives than technological advances
- Tobacco companies target U.S. immigrants
- Black parents who face racism head on are helping their kids’ mental health
- Racial discrimination may contribute to premature births and low birthweight
- Unemployment can be deadly
The articles highlighted below appear in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of the American Public Health Association.
Eliminating racial disparities would save many more lives than technological advances
The number of lives saved by advances in medical technology over the past decade pales in comparison to the lives lost due to racial inequities in the health care system.
According to an analysis of mortality data from 1991-2000, medical advances during that time period saved 176,333 lives. Yet resolving the disparities in death rates between whites and African Americans over that same time period could have prevented 886,202 deaths, according to the study’s authors.
“Five deaths could have been averted for every life saved by medical advances,” the study’s authors said. “The prudence of investing billions [of dollars] in the development of new drugs and technologies while investing only a fraction of that amount in the correction of disparities deserves reconsideration. It is an imbalance that may claim more lives than it saves.”
[From: “The Health Impact of Resolving Racial Disparities: An Analysis of U.S. Mortality Data.” Contact: Steven H. Woolf, MD, MPH, Virginia Commonwealth University, Fairfax, Virginia, swoolf@vcu.edu.]
Tobacco companies target U.S. immigrants
Tobacco companies have engaged in three distinct marketing practices aimed at gaining U.S. immigrants as customers, according to an analysis of major tobacco industry documents.
Researchers studied publicly available documents from five major U.S. tobacco firms – American Tobacco, Brown and Williamson, Lorillard, Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds – posted on Web sites. The documents in question covered the period of 1970-2003 and showed tobacco companies went after Asian and Hispanic immigrants in particular by launching geographically based marketing directed at immigrant communities, promoting assimilation into U.S. culture and exploring marketing strategies that would draw on immigrants’ strong ties to their native land.
The study’s authors suggest more in-depth research into the issue and urge public health advocates to launch their own counter-marketing strategies aimed at highlighting the devastating health effects of smoking.
[From: “Undoing an Epidemiological Paradox: The Tobacco Industry’s Targeting of U.S. Immigrants.” Contact: Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, PhD, MPA-URP, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, dacevedo@hsph.harvard.edu.]
Black parents who face racism head on are helping their kids’ mental health
Acknowledging and confronting racism is better for young children’s mental health than turning the other cheek, according to study of about 200 black Baltimore-area families.
When asked if they had experienced racism and what they did when discriminated against, parents who admitted to experiencing racism yet acted out against it in some way were less likely to see behavioral problems such as anxiety and depression in their preschool-aged children than those who either denied experiencing racism or ignored it. The families studied came from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and lived in many different neighborhoods.
[From: “Experiences of Racism Among African American Parents and the Mental Health of their Preschool-Aged Children.” Contact: Margaret O’Brien Caughy, University of Texas School of Public Health, Dallas, margaret.caughy@utsouthwestern.edu.]
Racial discrimination may contribute to premature births and low birthweight
Black women who perceive themselves as victims of racial discrimination seem to be at higher risk for giving birth prematurely and for having low-birthweight babies.
Two separate studies showed a strong correlation between perceived racism and preterm and low-birthweight births. In a study of 352 women participating in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study, 50 percent of the black women with preterm deliveries and 61 percent of those with low-birthweight infants reported experiencing racial discrimination at least three times. Among the white women, only 5 percent of those with premature deliveries and none of those with low-birthweight infants reported prior racism.
Another study that compared 104 black women who given birth prematurely to 208 black women who delivered full-term babies found that the more racial discrimination a woman faced during her lifetime, the higher her risk for premature birth.
[From: “Association of Self-Reported Experiences of Racial Discrimination With Black-White Differences in Preterm and Low-Birthweight Deliveries: The CARDIA Study.” Contact: Sarah Mustillo, PhD, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, N.C., smustillo@psych.duhs.duke.edu . Also from: Very Low Birthweight in African American Infants: The Role of Maternal Exposure to Interpersonal Racial Discrimination.” Contact: James W. Collins Jr., Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago, jcollins@northwestern.edu.]
Unemployment can be deadly
Being unemployed can up your risk for an early death, according to study of 875 female and 1,309 male twins.
Women in the study who had ever faced unemployment were almost three times as likely to commit suicide as those with steady jobs, and for men, the researchers found a strong association with unemployment and increased (death) risk of death from external undetermined causes.
For women study participants, smoking, use of alcohol, use of tranquilizers, illness and (poverty were 10 percent)low socioeconomic status were more prevalent among those who had ever been unemployed. The men who had been unemployed were more likely to be unmarried, have introverted personalities, suffer long-term illnesses and (be poor) low socioeconomic status than those who had never faced unemployment. Both men and women in the study who had ever been unemployed were also more likely to be divorced.
Yet even when researchers made adjustments to socioeconomic status and other factors that could affect a person's ability to work, unemployment still was a strong indicator of early death.
[From: "Unemployment and Early Cause-Specific Mortality: A Study Based on the Swedish Twin Registry." Contact: Margaretha Voss, PhD, MPH, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, margaretha.voss@cns.ki.se.]