Blacks dying for lack of basic health care

• Disparities cost 886,000 lives in the U.S. in '90s

More than 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same care as whites, according to an analysis in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The study estimates that technological improvements in medicine -- including better drugs, devices and procedures -- averted only 176,633 deaths during the same period. That means "five times as many lives can be saved by correcting the disparities [in care between whites and blacks] than in developing new treatments," Steven H. Woolf, lead author and director of research at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Family Medicine, said in a telephone interview. Woolf and four co-authors compiled and examined the data, which they drew from the National Center for Health Statistics. "We were trying to say that there was something you could do in medical research to improve health outcomes," said co-author David Satcher, former U.S. Surgeon General and current director of the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine. "But if you didn't focus more on the translation of that into especially the populations that tended to be left behind . . .you were not going to get as much out of the research as you would otherwise." [more]