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Blacks and Cancer : A Deadly Combination!
Terry Dean
Daily Egyptian
With blacks making up 13 percent of the U.S. population, African-Americans continue to suffer from high incidents of contracting deadly diseases.
Recently, a $22 million grant was approved for cancer researchers to conduct a study on why blacks are more likely to develop the deadly disease than other groups.
More than 105,000 people, mostly blacks, will be a part of the study, which will take place in six southeastern states - Alabama , Florida , Georgia , Mississippi , South Carolina and Tennessee . The
Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and Meharry Medical College in Nashville , and the International Epidemiology Institute in Rockville , Md. , will undertake the ambitious five-year project.
I guess blacks should thank the National Cancer Institute for providing the funding. Thank you for lending support for such a worthy endeavor, but I ask what took so long. The issue of high cancer rates among blacks, and for that matter high incidents of
AIDS cases as well, is not breaking news among blacks. Not to sound cynical or bitter, although I suspect some will read it that way regardless, there should have been greater attention paid to this issue in the past.
In the last 15 years, I've lost relatives to cancer and AIDS. One of my cousins fought the disease for more than year. She died during the Halloween break. Arlean Dean-Williams was the youngest of my father's brother's children. She would have turned 40 this December. So this issue is a little personal with me, as it is with others who have lost family members to cancer.
I also saw the disease take the life of a neighbor in the community I grew up in on the west side of Chicago . She was in her 30s. These are just people I know. What about the millions of people currently suffering from the disease? The study plans to explore why blacks are 33 percent more likely to die from cancer than whites and twice as likely to die from cancer as Asian/Pacific Islanders.
Yes, cancer rates have fallen among the population as a whole, but the incidence rate for all cancers combined among African-American men remains 27 percent higher and the death rate remains 45 percent higher than among white males, according to the American Cancer Society. The cancer death rate for African-American women was 22 percent higher than for white women. Prostate cancer is the biggest killer of black men with a 60 percent death rate, which is double the rate for white men. AIDS has also been a killer of black people.
The World Health Organization estimates the number of people living with HIV at 36.1 million globally. In 1999, African-Americans comprised 47 percent of AIDS cases in the United States . Before people, as they like to do, start pointing the finger at African-Americans saying, "Well why don't you people just use protection, or stop using drugs." You could say the same thing to whites who suffer from the disease, but pointing fingers is a waste of time. Everyone should be more careful. Having said that, it should also be pointed out that 25.3 million cases of HIV infection are reported in sub-Saharan Africa . If you want to know more about that, search the Daily Egyptian archives for a previous Keeping it Real on AIDS and Africa ; for now I'm staying close to home.
Before I'm accused of pulling a Johnny Cochran and trying to play the race card, I don't want to see high rates of these diseases with any group or nationality. But they are wrecking havoc in the black community. With every passing day there seems to be something new killing black folk. Be it cancer, AIDS, black-on-black
crime, or being shot 41 times while reaching for your wallet, but let me not digress to far off the path.
I guess it's better late than never, but we in the black community have tried to bring attention to this issue for the past 10 years. This is a landmark cancer study, and much good should come from it. I'll temper my dissatisfaction with the lack of progress in the
past in hopes that we can get a handle on these deadly diseases, not just for blacks but everyone suffering from cancer.
Keeping It Real appears every other Monday. Terry is a senior in journalism. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the Daily Egyptian.
http://www.dailyegyptian.com/fall01/11-12-01/deancolumn.html