Black Americans experienced a startling 1.63 million excess deaths compared with white Americans over the past 22 years.
According to KFF Health News, a study published Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA found that Black people’s higher mortality rate from 1999 to 2020 resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life compared to the white population.
The study’s authors characterize it as a call to action to enhance the health of Black Americans, whose higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and infant mortality contribute to their disproportionately early deaths.
“Real lives are being lost. Real families are missing parents and grandparents,” said study author Herman Taylor, a director at the Morehouse School of Medicine, KFF reported. “Babies and their mothers are dying. We have been screaming this message for decades.”
From 1999 to 2011, the country made headway in bridging the gap between white and Black death rates, but that development stagnated from 2011 to 2019. Two decades of advancement were undone in 2020 by the large number of deaths brought on by COVID-19, which was particularly hard on Black Americans.
Clyde Yancy, a study author and the chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said the country’s long history of discrimination contributes to Black people’s high mortality rates more than genetics.
Yancy noted that Black communities redlined in the 1930s, because they were deemed too “high risk” for mortgages and other investments, remain poorer and sicker today. There were also more COVID-19 infections and deaths in previously redlined ZIP codes.
Non-Hispanic White Americans in 2021 could anticipate a life expectancy at birth of 76 years, compared with a 71-year life expectancy for non-Hispanic Black Americans. Non-Hispanic Black infants are 2 1/2 times as likely to pass away before their first birthday than non-Hispanic White infants. Regarding the likelihood of dying from a pregnancy-related problem, non-Hispanic Black women are more than three times more probable than non-Hispanic White mothers.
Tonia Branche, a neonatal-perinatal medicine fellow in Chicago who was not involved in the JAMA study, said racial health disparities are so deeply ingrained that wealth and education cannot completely eradicate them.
Black women with college degrees were more likely to die from pregnancy-related problems than white women without a high school diploma. Branche suggested that stress, such as that caused by systematic racism, may have a more negative impact on Black mothers’ health than was previously thought.
According to a companion study, racial and ethnic imbalances cost the United States $421 billion in medical costs, lost productivity and early deaths in 2018.
Khaliah Johnson is the director of pediatric palliative care at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. While she was not part of the JAMA study, she noted that Black individuals bear a disproportionately heavy burden of grieving, which can negatively impact their mental and physical health.
Johnson said she hoped the new study would help people understand how society is impacted when Black individuals die too soon.
“We as Black people all have some legacy of unjust, unwarranted loss and death that compounds with each new loss,” said Johnson, whose parents lost two boys, KFF reported. “It affects not only how we move through the world, but how we live in relationship with others and how we endure future losses.”
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