White Women, Black Women, Breast Cancer
Here’s an awful irony:
African-American women have lower incidence-rates of breast cancer than white women and yet are 41% more likely to die from it. They get mammograms as often as white women, yet by the time they get a diagnosis, the cancer has spread to other organs in 45% of African-American women and yet only in 35% of white women.
In fact, reports the New York Times, “Black women fare worse at each phase of management: follow-up of abnormal findings, starting treatment and completing it.” One reason is that black women, more than white women tend to have “types of tumors that have a poorer prognosis.” And yet all of this holds for black women whose health insurance is similar to that of white women. A reason may be that white women have, on the whole, “shorter intervals between diagnosis and start of treatment.”
A Centers for Disease Control study recognized the issues’ complexities yet also concluded that better results can be had with better overall health care availability and delivery in African-American communities.
We must do better.
10/04/2019 @ 10:23 am
I had to revise the featured image again. Featured images have to be 4x wide by 3x high. or 650 x 480. The easiest way to fix this is to insert the smaller image, and then use the snipping tool to approximate the correct ratio by copying the featured image that appears when you open the article.