June 26, 2009 Much is often said about the glaring statistics
showing that some racial and ethnic minorities face greater
risks than whites when it comes to health. Nina T. Harawa, an
Assistant Professor and researcher at Charles Drew University,
says today's disparities are linked to many factors, including
economics, access to health care and the impact of living in a
race conscious society. But in the recent issue of Ethnicity and
Disease, she writes that the concept of race is often
misunderstood or inconsistently used when examining differences
(or "disparities") in health outcomes. "There is no gold
standard for the use of race in health research," said Harawa,
who co-wrote the article with Assistant Professor Chandra L.
Ford, PhD, of the UCLA School of Public Health. Harawa said
there are no readily agreed-upon standards for measuring
someone's race, as in the case of gauging someone's age.
Nevertheless, race has been used to categorize people since
before the country's founding. Efforts to simplify th