So, here we are in the year 2020 and there is a resurgence of pollution that kills, this time it is African Americans carrying the co-morbidity burden of pollution.
...Health care increasingly needs (click here) to address the management of individuals with multiple coexisting diseases, who are now the norm rather the exception. In the United States, about 80% of Medicare spending is devoted to patients with 4 or more chronic conditions, with costs increasing exponentially as the number of chronic conditions increases. This realization is responsible for a growing interest on the part of practitioners and researchers in the impact of comorbidity on a range of outcomes, such as mortality, health-related quality of life, functioning, and quality of health care....
This is a professional article about co-morbidities and the cost of such them. Co-morbidities are a negative spiral. The more chronic health conditions an individual has the more likely they will have others especially when the cause is within their living, working, and home environments. This is the problem the poor and working poor face all the time. Segregation adds to the danger because of the African American ability to move their lives out of their work and home environments are nearly impossible.
I know an African American couple that lives in a neighborhood where primarily the wealthy reside. She stated she would never move no matter how much she and her husband have to work due to the schools affiliated with this neighborhood and the cleaner air and water. The couple has children. These successful couples are too few and far between when it comes to Zip Codes with dangerous pollution.
This is also a very sad sorry by this couple, because, they may be displaced from their home towns. Robert Taylor in the reporting below have lived in the same hometown all his life, regardless of the cruelty of reality. The statistics bear out that African Americans are exposed to far more environmental danger than others.
June 21, 2020
By Luke Denne
Robert Taylor (click here) has lived on the banks of the Mississippi River in Reserve, Louisiana, his entire life. Both of his parents worked in the local sugar refinery when plantations made up this stretch of the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
But where sugar cane once grew, chemicals now spew from smoke stacks.
When the petrochemical industry moved in, the predominantly Black community’s health began to suffer.
“We didn't know why. We were just ignorant plantation hands, you know, the descendants of slaves," he said.
A higher risk of cancer in these communities — surrounded by the densest concentration of petrochemical plants in the country — have led to the area gaining the unwelcome title of “Cancer Alley.” Similar situations have played out in communities across the U.S. in which Black communities have had to endure more pollution than their white neighbors....
It isn't as though the government doesn't know. (click here)
