WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Cigarette smoking and lung cancer mortality rates overall are declining in the U. S., but lung cancer death disparities between the races – blacks and whites – remain alarming, leading health care and anti-smoking experts say.
“We haven’t closed the gap. While everybody’s improving, the gap is not closing. The five-year survival difference is still in the range of 10 to 15 percent for Blacks and Whites. So while it’s an improvement for all groups, the difference or the disparity remains,” says Dr. Harold Freeman, a respected surgical oncologist and director and founder of Harlem’s Ralph Lauren Cancer Center for Cancer Care and Prevention. He explains, “It’s like you have the front wheels and back wheels of a car, but no matter how fast you go, the back wheels are never going to catch up.”
The association of state attorneys general reported in March that data derived from federal government tax collections shows a 4.2 percent decline in cigarette sales last year and a drop of 20 percent since the attorneys general reached a legal settlement with tobacco companies in 1998.
Anti-tobacco activist Sherry Watson-Hyde, executive director of the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, is happy that the rates have declined for African-American smoking, though not deeply enough.
“Black male lung cancer rates have been over the top,” Watson-Hyde says. Even with the state tobacco settlements, she said the tobacco industry still finds new ways to ensnare smokers with flavored cigarettes special promotions.
The NAATPRN and other anti-tobacco organizations, such as the American Legacy Foundation, which has awarded a three-year grant of $4.5 million to a coalition of six national Black organizations, including the National Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation, for tobacco prevention and cessation programs, focus largely on reverse marketing by educating African-Americans on the dangers of tobacco smoke.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that while the annual white lung cancer death rate is approximately 58 percent per 100,000 diagnoses, the rate for blacks is 64 percent per 100,000. Cancer experts say the rates have remained consistently disparate – within the 15 percentile over the past two decades – even when fluctuating. Black and White women are about the same at 40 percent for Black women and 42 for White.
Tobacco use is the major cause of lung cancer in the United States.
About 90 percent of lung cancer deaths in men and nearly 80 percent of lung cancer deaths in women in the U. S. are due to smoking. Why are black men dying of lung cancer at such higher rates? And what is being done about it?
Freeman believes race play a role.
“Race is a determinant in how people get treated for cancer even when they’re at the same economic status; not just lung cancer, but in general,” he says. “The biggest challenge in America for disparities is to get standard treatment for everybody, to make it available somehow.”
He says that unless a system is created that targets people’s ability to get early medical intervention regardless of their ability to pay, the disparities will remain. A publicly funded “patient navigation” program that he started 16 years ago for breast cancer patients should be a model for the nation for all types of cancer, he says. The public program pays for breast cancer screening for women regardless of their socio-economic status.