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Blacks Urged To Bridge Health Inequities By Hazel Trice EdneyNNPA COLUMBUS, Ohio (NNPA) – Lisa Fager remembers her father as a big man – in both stature and in reputation. The 6’3″ 250-pound Casey Powell Jr., a Black man, owned businesses in Lancaster, Penn. As big as he was, one of her most vivid memories of him was the day he cried as she rushed him to an emergency room in 1987, a year after undergoing a triple bi-pass heart surgery. “He wasn’t having chest pains. He says he just knew something was wrong. He was swelling and he just didn’t feel right,” recalls Fager. “I’d never seen my father cry.” The doctors were of little help. “They said he had gas,” she recalls. Then, they sent him home. Two days later, he died of heart failure at the age of 43, leaving behind a 17-year-old daughter, two sons, ages 10 and 3; and a 34-year-old widow. Though her father died 18 years ago, Fager fought back tears as she recounted the story at a Town Hall meeting on health disparities at the National Conference of Black Mayors. Did Fager’s father die prematurely because, as has been recently documented, White doctors don’t refer Black patients to specialists at the same rate that they refer Whites? These are life and death issues. Of the 15 top killers, African-Americans lead in 11 categories. “As a Black American, I am concerned that the disparities in care and access to care are so pronounced that nearly a million deaths between 1991 and 2000 would not have occurred if African-Americans had received the same care as Whites,” says Inglewood, Calif. Mayor Roosevelt F. Dorn, NCBM’s new president, who leads the Black mayors’ education campaign on tobacco-related diseases and other health disparities. Health experts say there is legitimate reason for concern. “At every level of income, Black folks die sooner than White folks,” said Dr. Adewale Troutman, director of the Metro Louisville Health Department in Kentucky. “Economics is only a part of the answer, but we have to go back to this question of racism…Provider attitudes and internalized racism in the provider attitudes is a part of the problem,” he explained. Troutman said every Black organization should have a health agenda to deal with racial disparities. He says there should also be a community coalition that monitors hospitals and report racial disparities in treatment and deaths. Hospitals that discriminate should lose Medicare and Medicaid funding, he said. The disparities are striking, said town hall moderator George E. Curry, editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service. Curry cited health disparity numbers published in last year’s National Urban League’s “State of Black of America” report. David R. Williams, a senior research scientist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, wrote in the report that Blacks had higher death rates than Whites in 11 of the 15 leading causes of death in the United States. The diseases are heart disease, cancer, stroke, accidents, diabetes, flu and pneumonia, kidney diseases, septicemia, homicide, cirrhosis of the liver and hypertension. With major improvements in the overall health of Americans over the past 50 years, racial disparities have either remained the same or widened, Williams reported. The Town Hall meeting was a part of the mayors’ agreement to help educate city leaders on tobacco cessation and the health of African-Americans overall. The American Legacy Foundation, the nation’s only foundation solely focused on tobacco prevention and cessation, last year awarded a $4.5 million, three-year grant to a coalition of six national Black organizations. The group includes the National Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the National Conference of Black Mayors, and the National Association of Neighborhoods. Legacy Executive Vice President Amber Hardy told the mayors that the root cause of many of the diseases killing Blacks can be traced back to tobacco. “We often don’t think seriously about tobacco use as a major culprit for a host of other killers, including heart disease, cancers, and stroke…And the number of our children suffering with asthma due to second-hand smoke is increasingly on the rise,” Hardy said. “An epidemic is now here and it’s very evident by its toll on our collective health.” Hardy pointed out that approximately 45,000 African-Americans die from tobacco-related illnesses each year. The Center for Disease Control has reported that if current smoking patterns of African-Americans continue, an estimated 1.6 million Black people currently under the age of 18 will become regular smokers and about 500,000 of them will eventually die of a smoking-related disease. Fager, hired by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to educate college students on the dangers of tobacco, says part of the problem is just plain lack of knowledge. Therefore she has worked to form coalitions of student organizations for creative ways to educate students about the dangers of tobacco. “We have a lot of work to do,” she says. “We still have students – I mean college-educated students – asking which ones are the safe cigarettes.” Renita Carter, National Urban League programs coordinator for youth development, agrees that coalition-building is the key. She says the Urban League will continue to educate the public on cigarette smoking and other health care issues, such as obesity, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS through the “State of Black America” report and by partnering with other caring organizations. “We’re about partnering with the NAACP and taking a stand with American Legacy because we believe in order to reach our community, we have to do it as community and as a village,” Carter says. The decision by Black organizations to take on the fight against tobacco use and health disparities should not be downplayed, said Dorn, president of NCBM. “The fact that six major Black organizations are working together cooperating to reduce and prevent tobacco use is of tremendous significance. This level of cooperation and support is unprecedented since the civil rights movement in the 1960s,” Dorn said. NCBM held a separate seminar on “Getting the Smoke Out” during last week’s conference in order to educate its members on tobacco cessation. It plans to educate the public through a media campaign aimed to collect 100,000 written pledges from households promising not to allow smoking in the home and also by working with municipalities to form anti-tobacco programs with cash rewards. Reversing the trend of the cultural habit will not be easy, said Sam Gresham, president of the Columbus Urban League. Not only cultivating and farming tobacco, but chewing it, smoking it in pipes and using snuff were parts of socializing, Gresham said. “There’s a big cool thing that’s associated with smoking,” he said. Gresham declared. “I stopped smoking because of a woman. She said, ‘I don’t want it in my house any more. You can’t come into my house with it.'” Monica Anderson, foundation development manager for the NAACP, also admits to being a former smoker. “Once you decide that’s not something you need to do, you stop drinking and smoking so much and you find that you’re living a much healthier life,” Anderson said. Anderson says the NAACP is making anti-tobacco and health issues a part of its civil rights agenda by establishing a Web site on racial health disparities and a national leadership roundtable to push for universal health care. “When there’s a fight on the [Capitol] Hill for universal health care, for universal health insurance, we need to be there,” Anderson said. The question is whether Black people will fight for their own lives, said Troutman. “We can talk this for the next two centuries, but if we don’t want to be healed and if we don’t, once and for all, ferret out internalized racism and love ourselves enough to be healed, we’ll be talking about this 200 years from now. They’ll say, ‘There used to be a time when there were Black folks, but they’re all dead now.'”