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Is tackling health disparities a pressing health and human rights concern? Aside from the moral imperative to provide people the opportunity to reach their full potential for health, why is health equity so important?

At a conference I attended in June, Dr. Jim Kim, president of the World Bank, spoke about the notion of a moral imperative backed by support. He said, “24% of growth in full income in developing countries from 2000-2011 resulted from health improvements.” The struggle for health equity is a moral imperative, one that is now backed by support for economic growth.

To help ethnic minorities help themselves and to support them as they ascend the rungs of the economic ladder—to rise above a history of systematic oppression and progressive socioeconomic injustices—we must push for policies that aim to establish health parity. Policies which redistribute resources to target populations—not populations which provide the most convenient access—such, are the triumphs in the battle against disparities.

Nonprofits that represent the ideals of health equity, such as those working towards universal access to immunization face the hindrance of inadequate disease surveillance; wherein, targeting populations at greatest risk is a difficult task. Despite efforts from the WHO/UNICEF’s Joint Reporting Form (JRF) in developing reports on the global status of immunization safety; fear of global vaccination programs’ failures to reach the most at-risk populations remain a plausible threat. Those advocating for global immunization listen as policy-makers voice these concerns; a situation I myself have been unable to avoid.

As I struggled to envisage a solution, I spoke to Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance, on issues regarding disease surveillance. He recognized this concern as an impediment to reaching certain populations, highlighting the reality that there are regions where women can go from birth to death without being registered. In probing him for solutions, he suggested both long and short term goals; the former being to fix the surveillance systems in place, and the latter—a quicker fix—increasing active surveillance. Thus, improving visibility on previously undocumented regions, allowing high-risk groups to be better targeted and the gap in health parity inched closer.

This, however, is not a struggle seen exclusively in the realm of global health; the local struggle to gain visibility on certain racial/ethnic groups may be contributing to issues of health disparities. It’s no wonder the Institute of Medicine’s Race, Ethnicity, And Language Data: Standardization for Healthcare Quality Improvement reports highlight the dilemmas with “inadequate data on race, ethnicity, and language” as it pertains to “lowering the likelihood of effective actions to address health disparities” (“HHS Disparities Action Plan”). Emphasizing the need for “more fine-grained categories of ethnicity and language need” (McFadden, 2009).

Globally target populations can be overlooked due to less functional health systems and lack of disease surveillance. Locally ethnic minorities exist and insensibly categorizing them in a group—to which they do not belong—is to tell them that they do not exist. This flawed social construct only helps to reinforce and overlook health disparities, which manifest in groups that have suffered historical social and economic injustices. Hope arises through the public’s realization and engagement in the creation of equal rights for all. By virtue of inciting the political will to end poverty and health disparities, political reform can be attained and disparities assuaged.

 

  1. DISPARITIES, A. N. F. O. HHS Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.
  2. McFadden, B., Nerenz, D. R., & Ulmer, C. (Eds.). (2009). Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data:: Standardization for Health Care Quality Improvement. National Academies Press.

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“Written into our bodies is a lifetime of experience – shaped by social conditions often even more powerful than our genes.” – In Sickness and in Wealth