Health inequities

Watch and Share: Why Public Health. Now is the time.

Founder Health eVillages, Dean’s Advisory Board member

Managing Partner, Galen Partners, LLC., Chair of Dean’s Advisory Board

Author, Alumni Leadership Council Member

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the harsh reality of health inequities. As of August 2020, Black and Latinx Americans had contracted the virus at roughly three times the rate of white Americans; low-income communities have fared worse than wealthy ones.

Such inequities are not new, and certainly not limited to COVID-19. But the COVID-19 pandemic has created a window of opportunity to change the conversation on health—nationally and globally. Now is the time to connect the dots between social justice and health.

SPH is home to a number of faculty examining health disparities. Their projects include:

An investigation of the novel and persistent structural forces that narrow access to critical prevention services for disenfranchised people who use drugs
The ongoing Black Women’s Health Study, the largest follow-up study of African American women yet undertaken, including 64,500 black women, ages 21–69, from all areas of the US, enrolled in 1995
Formative research on adolescent dating abuse, focused on Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, and Native American youth, with the aim of creating a new dating abuse measurement instrument

Preventing disease means attending to the conditions that can cause and exacerbate poor health. In particular, it means acting when these conditions create pockets of marginalization that put certain populations at disproportionate risk. Donors can support SPH’s efforts against health inequities in multiple ways.