Prognosis Grim for Poor
Minorities
By Tom Maccabe (reprinted
with permission from The Medical Herald, Vol.13, No.2, March 2001)
(Continued
from previous page)
The
study will compare long-term changes in self-care behaviors of African-Americans
and Caucasians, age 65 and older, who are suffering from at least one of two
chronic illnesses that are prevalent among the elderly -- osteoarthritis or
ischemic (coronary artery) heart disease.
“This
grant will allow us to look at differences in how elderly black and white
patients care for themselves and how these self-care behaviors change over the
length of the illness, and to determine if those differences affect health
outcomes, “ said Myrna Silverman, Ph.D., professor of public health and
anthropology and the study’s principal investigator.
Information gathered from the participants will help
researchers define how patients develop, maintain and challenge self-care
behaviors, and how these behaviors are affected by changes in the disease, the
patient’s environment and his or her social and psychological characteristics.
Results will show how these self-care behaviors affect the
patient’s long-term quality of life and physical and mental health, and how
racial differences in self-care contribute to different outcomes.
The study, which will be completed in mid-2004, is funded
through a grant from the National Institute of Aging, one of the National
Institutes of Health.
Heart disease is not confined to long-time minority
residents; many immigrants bring the disease and other problems to the country
and often overwhelm emergency rooms with others seeking care.
Joshua Wiener, Ph.D., principal research associate at the
Urban Institute, based here, observed:
“With the rising number of uninsured and the growing number
of immigrants, many of whom are legally ineligible for Medicaid as a result of
welfare reform, I think the cities are in for a very rough road over the next
several years in terms of their populations.”
Peggy Valentine, Ed.D., associate dean of the Division of
Allied Health Services at Howard University, urged Congress to appropriate more
money to train health providers who will work in the inner cities.
“That’s the first thing we need to do, “ she said.
Waves of immigrants from Latin America,
the Caribbean and Africa have brought a host of new health problems to the inner
cities.
Accidental Injuries
But illegal immigration patterns are changing.
For example, many illegal Mexican are flooding to New York City rather
than California, which was the prime location in the past.
In Harlem, there is a new surge of Africans who are competing with
arrival of Caribbean blacks.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that tuberculosis
among foreign-born persons living in the United States is increasing.
In 1999, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 43
percent of the 17, 531 TB cases reported in this country were among foreign-born
persons, compared with 24 percent of the 25,701 cases reported in 1990, the CDC
said.
Other devastating problems among immigrant populations
include HIV/AIDS, drug addiction and malnutrition.
Cultural differences among immigrants pose a challenge to
health providers, most of whom are white (...NEXT
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