Minority health is getting more and more attention. Despite continued racial disparities in access to health care, the attention being paid to this issue appears to be paying off. Efforts by the federal government to address racial disparities, such as the National Institute of Health's Office of Research on Minority Health, are resulting in new efforts to study sickle cell disease, a condition primarily affecting blacks. The Minority Health Initiative, a federal program, is developing a $20 million center to focus on correcting health disparities among minorities.

A new book by two Harvard researchers, An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race: Beginnings to 1900 explores the roots of racial disparities. The book states that a history of "abuse, exploitation, and ethical turpitude" dating back to the roots of Western medicine accounts for racial discrepancies in the health care system and higher mortality rates among blacks. Dr. Linda Clayton, a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, and her husband, Dr. Michael Byrd, who has spent 25 years studying racism's influence on the health care system, say that the problems blacks face in today's health care system are not a "recent aberration," but the evolution of problems that began with the beginning of medicine in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome. While acknowledging that economic and social inequities contribute to gaps in medical treatment between blacks and whites, the authors say racism and myths taught in American medical schools in the early 1800s continue to affect the medical treatment of minority groups, especially blacks.

To learn more about minority health issues, visit:

http://www1.od.nih.gov/ormh/main.html

To learn more about An American Health Dilemma:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/php/medicalcare/claycover.htm