Tue February 19, 2013 WMU speaker considers "health equity" The
federal government says black babies are up to three times more
likely to die than white infants. And the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention say more African-Americans suffer from
high blood pressure than whites do. Those and other disparities
in health and health care are the subject of the annual Burian
Lecture on Wednesday, February 20th, at Western Michigan
University. Brian Gibbs is an assistant professor at the Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine. He says the problem
involves much more than differences in rates of disease. That’s
because minorities disproportionately live in areas with high
poverty rates and more pollution as well as lower access to
health care services and healthy food. Gibbs says differences in
a person’s situation can have big effects on the results of
health care that is available. He says the first step toward
solving the problem is getting more and better data to determine
what exactly the challenges a