Black Chicagoan – highest breast cancer mortality rate | Chocolate City: The Best African American Blog

Black Chicagoan – highest breast cancer mortality rate

Mammography screening

The Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force recently released its report – highlighting the alarming breast cancer mortality disparity between black and white since 2005. In 1980, black women and white women in Chicago with breast cancer were equally likely to die.

New breast cancer mortality data from 2004 and 2005 provided a sobering backdrop for the Task Force’s report. Director of the Sinai Urban Health Institute, Steve Whitman, Ph.D., released the new data, which showed that the black-white disparity in breast cancer mortality rates in Chicago continued to grow. Through 2005, the last year for which mortality data are available for Chicago, the breast cancer mortality rate for African-American women in the city of Chicago was 116% higher than that of white women, a huge increase from the 68% disparity in 2003.

While advances in mammography screening and breast cancer treatment in Chicago have benefited white women over the last 25 years, these advances have not helped reduce breast cancer mortality for African-American women. The mortality rate from breast cancer of African-American women in Chicago in 2005 was even higher than that of white women in 1980. The lack of progress for African-American women is compounded by the fact that white women have a higher incidence of breast cancer. Thus, although white women get breast cancer at a rate that is 18% higher, African-American women die from it far more often.

Experts say genetics or biology alone cannot explain the difference. The racial gap in Chicago was twice that of the United States and sevenfold that of New York City.

"It was as if no screening or treatment was going on for black women, which we knew was not true," said Dr. David Ansell, chairman of the task force, made up of 74 health-care groups and more than 100 breast cancer physicians, researchers and advocates.

Black women are less likely to get mammograms, the task force notes, and when they do, the mammograms are more likely to be of inferior quality. Those diagnosed with cancer also are less likely to have access to quality treatment.