Health Inequalities Quotes

According to the American Heart Association, the prevalence of hypertension in African Americans in the United States is among the highest in the world.

A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor.

There's this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there's this mysterious thing called 'socioeconomic status' that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn't.

Ethnic minority women generally have poorer outcomes from their pregnancy compared to white women.

Not everybody who is overweight comes from deprived backgrounds, but that's where the propensity lies.

Let's make sure that we don't close down 37 of the 42 clinics in Texas and leave women with nowhere to go and put them in a situation where their health will be at risk, because what we do know is that closing down the ability to access that service unfortunately does not take the need away or women's confronting that issue away.

The job of the government - and my responsibility - is to help people live healthier lives. The framework is about giving local authorities the ability to focus on the most effective ways to improve the public's health and reduce health inequalities, long-term, from cradle to grave.

I am not saying do not give people equal health services but do not pretend that giving more money for diabetes or chronic diseases means you are going to deal with the origins of health inequalities.

The more you look into health and health inequalities, you realize that a lot of it is not due to a particular disease - it's really linked to underlying societal issues such as poverty, inequity, lack of access to safe drinking water and housing. And these are all the things we focus on at CARE.

On average, African-American women are 4 times as likely to die from pregnancy related complications. Latina women are at 2 times greater risk.

Every region in the world faces challenges - and Africa is hugely diverse, so its own challenges are varied.

Low socioeconomic status carries with it an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases, and this gradient cannot be fully explained by factors such as health-care access.

I can attest to the very real potential for unnecessary pain, suffering, and death when the work of public-health officials is curtailed.

In L.A., fat people are mythical. We're like Big Foot. 'Oh, yeah, my cousin knows someone who's fat.' Nobody's fat in L.A.

I'm not sure the least educated members of the population are missing out on the advances in medical technology as much as they are adopting harmful behavioral habits that shorten their life.

I was really interested in the fact that blacks have high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes at a higher percentage than the rest of the population. That didn't stay very aggressively in the book, but that's how it started. I began to document these moments as support for this other thing I was thinking about, and then the moments themselves began to take over.

American healthcare faces a crisis in quality. There is a dangerous divide between the potential for the high level of quality care that our health system promises and the uneven quality that it actually delivers.

Especially some of the poorest in our society need to have the greatest support because health inequalities are too wide.

Our Achilles heel is that we haven’t been able to successfully explain why it’s fair to penalize [insurance] applicants for risk factors they can’t control.

A large percentage of my father's patients were African-American.

If you look at three diseases, the three major killers, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, the only disease for which we have really good drugs is HIV. And it's very simple: because there's a market in the United States and Europe.

They don't actually see the real world, where 95% of the people with HIV are not treated and are dying. And even though we have some blue sky now in our country, the sky could become cloudy again very soon.

We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which James, the father on Good Times, had hypertension.

At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.

That's the thing. in medicine, you're used to saying there's a problem within the person, and saying there's a problem within the culture, that's not a medical answer. Medicine has to look in one direction, so there's only one type of answer that they can find.