Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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1981 - 198912

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Start date: 1980End date: 1989

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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    Racial and socioeconomic disparities in childhood mortality in Boston.
    (1985) Wise, P H; Kotelchuck, M; Wilson, M L; Mills, M
    We examined racial and income-related patterns of mortality from birth through adolescence in Boston, where residents have high access to tertiary medical care. Childhood mortality was significantly higher among black children (odds ratio, 1.24; P less than 0.05) and low-income children (odds ratio, 1.47; P less than 0.001). Socioeconomic effects varied for different age groups and causes of death. The largest relative disparity occurred in the neonatal and postneonatal periods, and the smallest in adolescence. Of the total racial differential in neonatal mortality (6.88 deaths per 1000 live births), 51.2 per cent occurred in premature infants, 13.4 per cent in term infants who were small for their gestational age, and 25.9 per cent in neonates who were both premature and small for their age. Black neonatal mortality was elevated at all income levels. Beyond the neonatal period, mortality from respiratory disease, fire, and homicide had strong inverse relationships with income, and mortality from injuries to the occupants of motor vehicles was directly related to income. These data suggest that despite access to tertiary medical services, substantial social differentiation in mortality may exist throughout childhood. Equity in childhood survival will probably require policies that emphasize preventive goals.
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    AIDS in minority populations in the United States.
    (1987) Hopkins, D R
    Among ethnic minorities in the United States, blacks and Hispanics, who compose 12 percent and 7 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, constitute 24 percent and 14 percent of the cases of AIDS. Seventy-eight percent of all children with AIDS are black or Hispanic, as are 71 percent of all women with AIDS. In the black and Hispanic communities, intravenous (IV) drug abuse is associated with much of the AIDS transmission, and parenterally acquired infections are spread secondarily by sexual and perinatal transmission. Almost two-thirds of black and Hispanic persons with AIDS in the United States reside in New York, New Jersey, or Florida. Important differences in the understanding of AIDS and human immunodeficiency virus infection and control measures in minority communities must be considered in devising information and intervention programs for those communities. Programs intended specifically for minorities, especially greatly intensified prevention and treatment of IV drugs abuse, are needed to supplement programs aimed at the U.S. population in general. Combatting AIDS offers black and Hispanic populations an opportunity to greatly reduce IV drug abuse, other sexually transmitted diseases, and teenage pregnancy.
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    Community empowerment as a strategy for health promotion for black and other minority populations.
    (1989) Braithwaite, R L; Lythcott, N
    THE HEALTH status of blacks, other minorities, and the poor remains unconscionably low when contrasted with that of white Americans. This disparity is not new but is an historical trend that can be seen across all categories of the leading causes of death and disease. In August 1985, the Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Black and Minority Health2 noted that minorities experienced approximately 60 000 "excess deaths" annually. Margaret Heckler, who was then the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, emphasized that the disparity is "an affront both to our ideals and to the ongoing genius of American Medicine." The six major contributors to the disparity between black and white death rates are cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke, diabetes, chemical dependency, homicide and accidents, and infant mortality. Since the 1985 report, blacks and Latinos, in particular, also have evidenced a disproportionately high rate
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    Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Black and Minority Health: a summary and a presentation of health data with regard to blacks.
    (1986) Nickens, H
    The Task Force on Black and Minority Health was created in early 1984 by Margaret Heckler, then Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The summary volume of the report was released by Secretary Heckler at a press conference on October 16, 1985.1 As described by her at the press conference, the impetus for the creation of the Task Force was her dismay at the persistent black and minority health disparities when compared with the white population. These disparities had been most recently reflected in DHHS's annual health statistical summary, Health USA for 1983.
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    Report of the Secretary’s Task Force Report on Black and Minority Health Volume I: Executive Summary
    (Gvernment Printing Office, 1985) Heckler, Margaret M.
    In January 1984--ten months after becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services--I sent Health, United States, 1983 to the Congress. It was the annual report card on the health status of the American people. That report--like its predecessors--documented significant progress: Americans were living longer, infant mortality had continued to decline--the overall American health picture showed almost uniform improvement. But, and that "but" signaled a sad and significant fact; there was a continuing disparity in the burden of death and illness experienced by Blacks and other minority Americans as compared with our nation's population as a whole
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    Bad blood: the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
    (The Free Press, 1981) Jones, James Howard
    An account of the experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service describes how medical treatment was withheld from Black sharecroppers infected with syphilis
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    An Ecological Perspective on Health Promotion Programs
    (1988) McLeroy, K. R.; Bibeau, D.; Steckler, A.; Glanz, K.
    During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in societal interest in preventing disability and death in the United States by changing individual behaviors linked to the risk of contracting chronic diseases. This renewed interest in health promotion and disease prevention has not been without its critics. Some critics have accused proponents of life-style interventions of promoting a victim-blaming ideology by neglecting the importance of social influences on health and disease. This article proposes an ecological model for health promotion which focuses attention on both individual and social environmental factors as targets for health promotion interventions. It addresses the importance of interventions directed at changing interpersonal, organizational, community, and public policy, factors which support and maintain unhealthy behaviors. The model assumes that appropriate changes in the social environment will produce changes in individuals, and that the support of individuals in the population is essential for implementing environmental changes.
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    Normal Human Aging: The Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging
    (NIH Publication, 1984) Shock, Nathan W.; Greulich, Richard C.; Costa, Paul T, Jr.; Andres, Reubin; Lakatta, Edward G.; Arenberg, David; Tobin, Jordan D.
    Normal Human Aging is an overview of the first 23 years of research findings about the natural course of human aging. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging was started in 1958 to "trace the effects of aging in humans." The BLSA recruited men aged 17 to 96 and women beginning in 1978 to participate in repeated assessments of health and physical and psychological performance. Visits were every two years over 2 1/2 days.
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    Were Tuskegee & Willowbrook 'studies in nature'?
    (1982) Rothman, David J.
    The book jacket of Bad Blood, James Jones's recent account of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, describes the project as one in which "science went mad". Apparently the case is exceptional, an aberration from normal biomedical research behavior. But put the Tuskegee experiment alongside the Willowbrook experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, in which retarded and institutionalized children were injected with live hepatitis viruses, and clearly something other than "mad science" was at stake. Both projects pose the critical questions: what should qulify as a "study in nature" - that is, one in which the researcher is a passive observer of the course of some natural process, such as a disease, which he or she is powerless to change? And, what research designs ought to be considered ethically permissible when subjects live under conditions of overwhelming social deprivation?