Another study finds racism damages women’s health

By Lloyd Nicholas

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sept. 5 (IPS)— A study in the midwest state of Minnesota is echoing the findings of a recent national report: women of color and female immigrants are often shabbily treated by health care providers, a key factor in explaining the relatively poor health of those women.

The study, by the Community Center of Excellence in Women’s Health (CCOEWH) and the College of St. Catherine, found that racism, along with poverty, is a major factor behind higher incidences of hypertension, premature births, mental illness, stress-related illness, and cardiovascular disease in the women.

“The lack of sensitivity and the racial discrimination on the part of health care providers result in higher levels of stress and depression resulting in the exacerbation of physical symptoms,” concluded the Minneapolis study, which was based on anecdotes from women and girls and scientific evidence.

Minneapolis, the twin city of St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota State, experienced a 145-percent spike in the number of foreign-born arrivals between 1990 and 2000, accounting for a more than 14-percent population hike, to more than 380,000 residents.

During the previous decade, the city’s population decreased 0.7 percent.

Sixty-eight women participated in the one-year study at the Pilot City Health Center in North Minneapolis, and all “reported having experienced significant racial discrimination in their daily lives and while seeking medical attention,” said researcher Linda Rushing.

The women and girls said they were not treated with respect and that insufficient attention was paid to their health concerns when they visited a medical professional.

Margarita, one of the participants (whose full names were withheld) told a recent public meeting in North Minneapolis that the city’s medical service does not treat people equally, noting that doctors are reluctant to listen to medical complaints of women she knows who seek medical services.

“Many Latina women fear [they are] not understood or well-taken care of and could die in the emergency room [ER] without anyone knowing what they are saying,” she said. “Feelings of racial discrimination provoke such fear — and that is scary.”

English-speaking patients, she added, were given preferential treatment in hospitals. “The doctors and nurses will treat the Anglo first and better because they know that the Anglos will defend themselves because they speak English.”

“Further, the Anglos go into the ER without our fear — they do not worry whether they will be treated like a human being,” added Margarita.

She suggested that because some 50 percent of the Latino community in the city “do not have legal papers to be here and are afraid of being deported and separated from their families,” they suffer in a culture of silence.

Rushing noted that the women and girls also complained that communication with health workers is often strained because of language difficulties.

The study here replicates US-wide public health reports, which show that African-American women are at particular risk of many diseases. Their rate of coronary heart disease (CHD) is 35 percent higher than that of white women, and their stroke rate is 71 percent higher.

In Minnesota, the annual age-adjusted death rate per 100,000 for African-American women (339) exceeds that for white women (284), according to the Women and Heart Disease Atlas.

Each year, approximately 3,200 women in the state develop breast cancer and 700 die from the disease. The mortality rate is 50 percent higher in African-American women (35.2 per 100,000) than in white women (24 per 100,000), even though the incidence rates are similar.

A 2002 nation-wide study by the Washington, DC-based Institute of Medicine (IOM) found higher mortality rates among groups of minorities in a range of clinical settings, including both public and private hospitals. In general, unequal treatment existed across a wide range of disease areas and clinical services, it concluded.

African Americans for example, experience the higher rates of mortality for heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular diseases and HIV/AIDS than any other race or ethnic group, said the study, Unequal Treatment: Confronting racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare.

American Indians disproportionately die from diabetes, liver diseases and unintentional injuries, while Hispanic Americans are almost twice as likely as a non-Hispanic to die from diabetes.

IOM also noted that concern is growing across the country that even at equivalent levels of access to healthcare, racial and ethnic minorities experience a lower quality of health service and are less likely to receive even routine medical procedures.

For example, the report says: “a large number of published research reveals that racial and ethnic minorities experience a lower level quality of health service, and are less likely to receive even routine medical procedures than are white Americans.”

“Relative to whites, African Americans — and in some cases, Hispanics — are less likely to receive appropriate cardiac medication or undergo coronary bypass, are less likely to receive peritoneal dialysis and kidney transplantation and are likely to receive a lower quality of basic clinical services.”

The women and girls in the Minneapolis study also said they want doctors to be aware of their home remedies.

A large number of Hmong (hill people from China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand), Latinos, Africans and Native American women use traditional methods of healing before turning to health services, but participants said those cultural remedies are ignored by health professionals.

The treatments include seeing a shaman (spiritual healer) and taking herbal and other folk remedies. “They want these western-trained health workers to know about their practices, respect them and to take time to understand how their ‘home’ remedies may help,” said researcher Rushing.

African American women in the study said that they did not trust the health care system and described instances of abuse, while admitting to a lingering fear about medical experiments on black persons.

They noted the Tuskegee syphilis experiment medical trials on blacks in Alabama, decades ago, and others conducted on newborn children of the Lakota Sioux Indians as reasons for not trusting doctors here.

Big Brother takes grip on US

By Paul Harris

New York City, New York, Sept. 7— The message of the posters on the walls of Skokie library is plain: Big Brother is watching you. The signs, put up by librarian Caroline Anthony, warn of the radical new laws that have given the American government power to monitor the reading habits of its citizens without telling them.

Now the FBI can also secretly record what web sites people look at. And what books they buy. Or videos they hire. “Libraries are all about freedom of knowledge and not having Big Brother watching you. We had to warn our users,” said Anthony.

She believed Skokie was particularly at risk. The Chicago suburb has a large population of immigrants, including many from countries such as Iraq and Iran. Two years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Anthony and many others think America is in the grip of a frightening extension of state power.

At the center of it is the Patriot Act, rushed through in the wake of the attacks to give authorities the legal weapons they needed to fight the “war on terror.” Instead, critics say, those weapons have also hit at America’s own civil rights and freedoms.

The act allowed the FBI to pull records from libraries and bookstores, defined “terrorism” to include direct action by protesters, widened the use of wire-tapping on phone calls and emails, and paved the way for the mass internment without charge of several thousand foreign nationals. The most vulnerable are Arabs, Asians and Muslims. “Essentially this is the most massive case of ethnic profiling since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War,” said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and author of a forthcoming book on the subject, Enemy Aliens.

The government refuses to number the amount of foreign nationals it holds without charge. But even those released and deported are still victims. The shadow of being detained for suspicion of terrorism is not easily lifted. Certainly Akil Sachveda is suffering. He is now a part-time pump attendant in Toronto. He used to own a petrol station, a bar and a pool hall in New Jersey, until one day the FBI came looking for an ex-employee who was a Muslim. The man had left but they arrested Sachveda instead on suspicion of Islamic terrorism, despite the fact he is a Hindu. He was held for five months and given no access to a lawyer. Prison guards threatened his life. Eventually he was deported to Canada. He was never charged, but he had lost everything. “It is so painful. It was terrifying, but you can’t fight the government,” he said.

Sachveda now can’t get a full-time job. His spell in prison puts off employers. “You either don’t get an interview or they let you go as soon as they find out. But I never did anything wrong.”

The extensions of state power go beyond round-ups and the Patriot Act. The FBI has secretly recruited campus police officers to monitor students and academics. The scheme was only uncovered after the interrogation of a Sri Lankan campus union organizer at the University of Massachusetts. Yaju Dharmarajah had applied to help with a state emergency co-ordination agency as part of plans to become an aid worker. But his Asian name and accent instead brought the local campus FBI officer to his house. “They thought I wanted to video their work as part of a terrorist plot,” he said.

“I am lucky. I have a white American wife. If she was Sri Lankan like me, I wouldn’t have said anything for fear they would deport us,” Dharmarajah said.

Others are also afraid. Last year Sister Virgine Lawinger, a 74-year-old Milwaukee nun, was traveling to an anti-war rally. But she was on a list of people considered too dangerous to fly and was stopped from boarding her plane. She believes her politics were to blame. “People should not be naive. My experience just raised the stakes for me. It shows we have to be even more alert to protecting our democracy,” she said.

Jan Adams, a journalist on the anti-war San Francisco newspaper War Times, has also been stopped at airports, as has her colleague Rebecca Gordon. New York lawyer Barbara Olshansky, who is involved in several anti-Patriot Act suits, is stopped almost every time she flies. She is frequently subjected to strip and full body searches. She now fears to leave the US, despite being an American citizen, out of concern she will not be allowed back. It has made her angry. “It is becoming an awful witch-hunt. At first I didn’t believe it, but now it is just horrifying to me,” she said.

But there is a growing movement to try to roll back the act. It is gathering support from across the political spectrum, including such notable Republicans as Idaho’s Senator “Butch” Otter, who has led an effort in Congress to curtail some of the act’s powers.

Across America more than 150 cities and counties have passed local legislation “opting out” of the Patriot Act. In Boise, Idaho, a Republican stronghold, a group calling itself the Boise Patriots is hoping to force the city council to add their city to the list. They are a diverse group, including anti-abortionists, women’s rights groups, environmentalists and pro-gun lobbyists. “If enough communities join this effort, we can roll this law right back,” said founder Gwen Sanchirico.

The movement has become so powerful that Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a nationwide tour to promote the Patriot Act. But it is already too late for some. Sachveda is not adjusting well to his newfound poverty and exile from his adopted home. “I lost everything. It would have been better if I had never come to America,” he said.

Source: Observer (UK)