CA and MA are about 6-7% black, below average. TX is about 12%, in line with national average. Hispanics are hardier than whites or anglos or whatever. There is something called the "hispanic health paradox". They're healthier than they ought to be given their poverty level:
-------------------------
Evidence suggests that social and economic factors are important determinants of health. Yet, despite higher porverty rates, less education, and worse access to health care, health outcomes of many Hispanics living in the United States today are equal to, or better than, those of non-Hispanic whites. This paradox is described in the literature as the epidemiological paradox or Hispanic health paradox.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Hispanic paradox: Income may be lower but health better than most
By Juliet Chung
Los Angeles Times
Thousands of Hispanic patients stream though the East Los Angeles practice of Dr. Hector Flores and his partners each year.
The older ones go to the family practice with arthritis and hypertension, the younger ones with diabetes and asthma.
What surprises Flores, however, is not how sick they are — it is how sick they are not.
Overall, Flores said, his patients are much healthier than one would expect given their low levels of income and education, factors epidemiologists long have known are linked to poor health.
"You can predict in the African-American population, for example, a high infant-mortality rate," he said recently, "so we would think a [similarly] poor minority would have the same health outcomes.
"But they don't. They're not there," he said, referring to outcomes among Hispanics.
Why Hispanics are not sicker — a phenomenon known to health officials as the Hispanic paradox — is puzzling to public-health experts, given the link between disadvantage and high disease and mortality rates.
In overall mortality rates and infant-mortality rates, two standard measures of a population's health, Hispanics' numbers approach and sometimes surpass those of whites.
In Los Angeles County in 2003, the age-adjusted mortality rate for Hispanics was 535 per 100,000, 33 percent less than for non-Hispanic whites and 52 percent less than blacks, according to the most recent data from the county's Department of Public Health.
Nationally that year, Hispanics' mortality rate was 621, 25 percent less than whites' and 43 percent less than blacks', according to National Vital Statistics Reports, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hispanics' infant-mortality rates reflect a similar pattern. In Los Angeles, the rate was 5.2 per 100,000 in 2003, 16 percent higher than whites' and 57 percent less than blacks'. The national rate was 5.7, about the same as whites' and 58 percent less than blacks'.
.....
seattletimes.nwsource.com |
