Higher Rates of Disease Among African Women: How Does it Affect our Lives?
This semester, I have been taking a Health Principles class which discusses various issues and practices useful for living a healthier lifestyle. The term paper for this class involves a family tree of diseases with report on the most prevalent one. As someone attending a historically black university, the results of this assignment was a dismal informal study on the health condition of families of African descent. Upon asking my classmates about their findings, I heard all of them report diabetes and high blood pressure (hypertension) in their families for generations. Sadly, this is only the beginning of the matter.
The United States Department for Health and Human Services reports that African Americans have higher rates of certain diseases and early death than whites. African American women are also twice as likely to develop diabetes as Caucasian women of the same age. The leading causes of death among African American women are heart disease, stroke, cancer, and kidney disease. Also, African Americans contract sexually transmitted diseases at higher rates, to the point where among women, two out of every three HIV cases are African Americans. These are only a few statistics that show that African women have a major struggle in regard to health.
There are many possible explanations for this unfortunate phenomenon. But there is a very noticeable pattern among these diseases in that they are all “lifestyle diseases,” meaning that lifestyle decisions affect the likelihood of a person developing a particular disease. Our diet, sexual choices, and other decisions we make will contribute to our health conditions in the future. As African women I think we must do ourselves a service by taking care of ourselves, both for our sakes and for our loved ones.