Author: Maryam Abdelrahman, Yr 12
Health care professionals including epidemiologists, who for months have been eagerly requesting everyone stays at home to minimize the spread of COVID 19, are now expressing support and encouragement for those leaving their houses and charging crowded streets to protest.
These protests are said to be the only the path to the cure for a different epidemic, which has taken the lives of many for centuries but has finally become more noticeable than ever in recent weeks. An epidemic severe enough that many, even those not in the healthcare industry, are willing to put their lives at risk in the midst of COVID to cure.
The epidemic refers to the widespread racism and prejudice inflicted on black communities. Over the past couple of weeks cities all across the United States have been titling racism as a public health crisis. The issue has become so alarming that it has recently been prioritized and given more attention than the COVID pandemic that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in a matter of months.
The epidemic’s severity is evident, and its symptoms are visible. This can be seen in the higher prevalence of health conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, asthma and heart disease amongst black Americans compared to white Americans. All of which are conditions linked to low grade inflammation, which research has proven to be strongly associated with trauma and high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. According to many health care professionals, long term exposure to racism significantly increases cortisol levels and influences the way genes are expressed. “So, whether we are talking about more people dying of COVID, or at the hands of the police, racism is ultimately the disease” says Dr. Maybank, vice president of the American Health Association.
Dr. McDonald, an emergency physician who has treated COVID 19 patients throughout the peak of the pandemic stated that “the disease burden was borne by communities of color”. This is no overstatement with black communities suffering from 3 times the rate of infection and 6 times the rate of COVID deaths compared to white communities. This is said to be due to the fact that black Americans make up most of the essential workforce, who remained working during lockdown putting them at higher risk of contracting the virus. Furthermore, when receiving treatment, they are given worse care than white Americans. This has been found to be true even when socioeconomic factors such as income and education are the same for both the black and white patients.
Jacqueline Dougé, medical director of the Howard County Health Department, says this issue stems from the fact that “people think of race as a biological factor in health outcomes, when it is not”. This misconception is said to be a result of flaws in the medical school system which teaches medical students to group disease risk factors by race without teaching students about the health effects of racism itself. It is therefore crucial that people understand that it is racism and not race that affects health. It is the social determinants of health, which include job opportunities, income, education, quality of food and access to healthcare, that are the cause of the health disparities. Racism prevents black Americans from receiving access to these necessities which in turn leads to the increased incidence of health conditions amongst the black community. In fact, black Americans are 75 percent more likely to live near sources of pollution such as factories, which explains the 500 percent higher death rate from asthma in black children relative to white children. This is especially important to consider now that recent research has revealed that a person living in an area with high amounts of fine particulate air pollution is at an 8 percent higher risk of dying from COVID than someone living in only one unit less of air pollution. These social determinants along with chronic stress caused by racism itself inflict substantial damage on the black community’s wellbeing. This is seen from the high infant mortality rate due to the racism black mothers are subjected to. This higher infant and maternal mortality rate is true even when the white mother is at a lower socioeconomic status than the black mother showcasing the extent of the damage caused by stress as a result of racism.
With these inequities now being more apparent than ever, it is no wonder that even health care professionals, who’s jobs for many years have been disconnected from social activism, are demanding for changes in the policies that have enabled discrimination to impact lives the way it does today.
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