Healthcare and Racism
Apr. 14, 2008 by Lisa Currie
From Newsweek…
We’re all the products of our environment and our genes. But when it comes to health, which factor is the trump card? Would a woman with a family propensity for ovarian cancer avoid coming down with the disease if she were raised on a macrobiotic diet in pollution-free rural North Dakota? Or on the flip side, could a white woman adopted from a middle-class family in Idaho into a poor Hispanic family in New York suddenly become vulnerable to diabetes or asthma?
Figuring out how the interplay of race, socioeconomic status, schooling and other environmental factors influences our health is a complicated challenge. But that’s what a new four-hour PBS series, “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” aims to do. The series premiered March 27 and ends April 17 and will soon be released on DVD. Producers Larry Edelman and Llew Smith say it was inspired by a medical mystery they discovered in their earlier documentary, “Race—The Power of an Illusion, “a series that investigated some common myths and misconceptions about race. They found, for example, that African-Americans have some of the highest rates of hypertension in world, which has been linked to heredity. But West Africans, who share many of the same genes as African-Americans, have some of the lowest blood-pressure rates.