Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 24, 1993 TAG: 9309050280
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By virtually every measurement, and by substantial margins, minorities are likelier than whites to suffer illness and disability, and to die at an early age.
The report, by Paul Puryear, a professor of government and senior research associate at UVa's Center for Public service, observes, for example, that:
The death rate for minority infants in 1990 was 17.5 deaths per 1,000 infants, or more than double the 7.4 per 1,000 for white infants.
The rate of low-birth-weight infants - commonly a result of inadequate prenatal care and a leading cause of infant deaths - was 11.7 percent for minority babies, compared to 5.7 percent for white babies.
Leading causes of death in the United States - heart disease, cancer, stroke (including high blood pressure) - each affect the black population in Virginia in much higher proportions than in the white population.
Puryear says what should go without saying: Because disparities in health status are so closely linked to low-income status, improvements in education, job training and employment would help improve minorities' health status.
It goes without saying, too, that many of the causes of these health problems are related to personal behavior, and are most readily addressed not by government programs but by better health habits.
Even so, the state could do more to address directly the health gap between whites and minorities. More preventive health-care plans aimed at blacks, for instance. More incentives for graduates of state-supported medical schools to provide primary health care in urban areas with large concentrations of minorities. Puryear urges affirmative action, if you will.
Which suggests that many white politicians, and white Virginians in general, will decide they can safely ignore this report.
Not only are calls for more preventive health services often perceived as pleadings only on behalf of poorer, meaning politically impotent, minorities. The UVa report may even give ammunition to those who believe that blacks and members of other minorities bring such problems on themselves - and there's nothing that government can, or should, do about it.
Puryear's study notes, for instance, that the homicide rate for nonwhites in 1990 was 25 per 100,000 population, compared to only 4.8 per 100,000 whites. And for young minority males, the rate is significantly higher than for their white counterparts. Plus, it's been rising dramatically in the last decade.
Some white politicians and taxpayers who follow media accounts of black youths killing each other in shootouts over drugs or in gang warfare may not feel sympathetically compelled to spend money on what Puryear calls a "preventable health disorder."
Neither may they feel as inclined to open government's purses for AIDS prevention upon learning that blacks - about 19 percent of the state's population - account for 38 percent of all AIDS cases in Virginia. (Of AIDS cases transmitted by intravenous drug use or heterosexual contact, blacks account for nearly three-quarters of the Virginia
cases, according to Puryear's report.)
Never mind, for the moment, that the problems mentioned above - from infant mortality rates to homicide rates to AIDS - are not black vs. white issues. They're not, any more than is teen pregnancy.
(Teen pregnancies, a leading contributor to poverty and children's health problems, occur in much higher proportions among minorities than among whites. But many more white teens get pregnant than do black teens. In Roanoke city, for instance, more white teens than black teens get pregnant, even though the pregnancy "rate" for blacks is twice as high as for whites.)
The point is that even for those not appalled by the human toll, even for those willing to write off entire segments of the minority population, it is economic idiocy to ignore the racial disparities in Virginians' health.
Mirroring national trends, the state's minority population (now, about 24 percent overall) is on the increase. Recent projections indicate that the minority community, particularly Asians and Hispanics, will balloon in future decades - in the nation and in Virginia.
To accept inferior health for minorities today is to assume it is OK if huge numbers of Virginians tomorrow are sickly and unproductive, and in need of more - and more expensive - government-financed health and welfare programs. It is to say this is OK because shrinking proportions of whites in the population can handle the bill.
Who thinks this can be safely assumed?
by CNB