Advanced Indigenous health by providing mobile HIV/STI testing, education, and culturally responsive interventions.
Author: Disparity Matters
Black Americans with multiple myeloma face mortality rates two to three times higher than white patients, with recent data showing 5-year death rates of 7.3 per 100,000 for Black men versus 3.7 for white men. Yet research reveals a troubling paradox: when Black patients receive optimal treatment, their survival outcomes match or exceed those of white patients. The disparity stems from systemic barriers rather than biology. Black patients are less likely to receive evidence-based therapies including protease inhibitors, immunomodulatory drugs, and stem cell transplants. They wait an average of 5.2 months before starting treatment compared to 2.6 months for white…
New York City recorded 1,791 new HIV diagnoses in 2024, marking a 5.4% increase from the previous year and the fourth consecutive year cases either rose or remained flat. This reversal ends a steady decline seen before 2020, according to the city’s 2024 HIV Surveillance Annual Report.The burden falls overwhelmingly on communities of color. Black and Latino New Yorkers accounted for 86% of all new diagnoses, despite representing roughly half the city’s population. Among newly diagnosed women, 91% were Black or Latina. Within the group of men who have sex with men—who represent 65% of cases where risk factors were…
Socioeconomic status overshadows race as the primary driver of cancer mortality in America, though racial disparities persist even when comparing people with similar educational backgrounds, according to comprehensive new data analyzing deaths from 2019 through 2023. Black adults face higher cancer mortality than White adults across all education levels, with gaps ranging from 7% to 28% among men and 2% to 43% among women. However, educational differences within each racial group prove far more dramatic. Among White men, those with a high school education or less die from cancer at nearly three times the rate of college graduates. Black men…
Older adults in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods face dramatically worse outcomes after hip fractures, spending nearly a month less at home during their first year of recovery compared to those in affluent areas, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.Researchers analyzed Medicare data from over 52,000 older adults with hip fractures and found that people in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods spent about 23 fewer days at home after their injury, even after accounting for age and chronic illnesses. Those living in deprived areas were more likely to identify as members of racial or ethnic minority groups and to…
Artificial intelligence systems designed to detect cancer are inadvertently learning to identify patients’ race, age, and gender from tissue samples, leading to diagnostic errors that disproportionately harm minority populations. Four prominent cancer screening tools can infer demographic details with over 80% accuracy, even without explicit training on such information.These biases emerge from flawed training data that reflects demographic imbalances and variations in laboratory procedures across different hospitals and regions. The AI models pick up subtle cues unrelated to disease, such as staining techniques or tissue preparation methods that correlate with demographic factors. Consequently, the systems often underperform for racial minorities…
In a nation awash in firearms, gun violence has become a public health crisis that falls hardest on Black communities, even as the industry increasingly markets weapons as tools of personal safety to those same neighborhoods. Black people were nearly 14 times as likely to die by gun homicide as white people in 2021, and Black men and boys make up just 6% of the population but more than half of homicide victims, starkly illustrating the burden of gun-related death on communities of color. Reporters describe how, during the covid pandemic, firearm deaths hit record highs while politicians treated gun…
UC Davis Health researchers are launching a study to understand why Latina breast cancer survivors are not getting genetic testing that could save their lives and protect their families. The research project, called Entendiéndonos, will recruit at least 300 Latina breast cancer survivors to identify what prevents them from accessing genetic counseling and testing.Genetic testing can detect mutations like BRCA that significantly increase cancer risk. According to principal researcher Luis Carvajal-Carmona, if a mother tests positive for a cancer-linked mutation, her family members can also get tested to determine their risk. Up to 5% of Americans carry genetic mutations associated…
A new study of 1,733 Black women with breast cancer in New Jersey warns that what patients eat before diagnosis may help widen already stark survival gaps. Black women “have the highest mortality rate from breast cancer compared with other racial or ethnic groups in the U.S.,” said lead author Tengteng Wang, who set out to probe “what factors might contribute to these differences.” In this cohort, Black patients who ate the most ultra-processed foods before their cancer was detected were 36–40% more likely to die from breast cancer or any cause than those who ate the least. Ultra-processed foods—industrial…
Artificial intelligence systems designed to diagnose cancer are introducing new racial disparities into medical care, according to a study from Harvard Medical School researchers. The AI models can infer demographic details directly from tissue slides and perform less accurately for certain racial groups.Researchers evaluated four commonly used pathology AI models and found consistent performance gaps. The systems struggled to distinguish lung cancer subtypes in African American patients and showed reduced accuracy when detecting breast, renal, thyroid, and stomach cancers in some demographic groups. Overall, these disparities appeared in roughly 29 percent of the diagnostic tasks analyzed.Kun-Hsing Yu, senior author and…