Report: Swine Flu Sends More Minorities To Hospitals Than Whites

According to a recently published report Swine flu is four times more likely to send Blacks and Hispanics to the hospital than Whites. The findings are believed to be the first published that detail a racial or ethnic breakdown of swine flu’s impact.

Researchers looked at more than 1,500 lab-confirmed swine flu cases reported to the Chicago Department of Public Health from late April through late July. The report echoes some unpublished information from Boston that found three out of four Bostonians hospitalized from swine flu were Black or Hispanic.

“It’s very disturbing, but intuitively it’s understandable, because we have tremendous inequities in most areas of health,” - Barbara Ferrer, Executive Director of the Boston Public Health Commission

The study found that Blacks with swine flu were hospitalized at a rate of 9 per 100,000, and Hispanics at a rate of 8 per 100,000. For Whites, the rate was 2 per 100,000. Health officials say the cause for the difference is probably not genetic, but more likely because Blacks and Hispanics suffer disproportionately from asthma, diabetes and other health problems that make people more vulnerable to the flu. Experts note the Chicago and Boston data represent limited information from only two cities and from only the first two or three months of the pandemic. The unpredictable manner of swine flu outbreaks means some parts of the city were hit before others and may have little to do with race.

“We don’t have anything definitive to say one group is more affected than another. I think it reflected more the neighborhoods the disease was first going through.” - Dr. Daniel Jernigan, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s not clear if a racial or ethnic difference will hold up when more complete national data is available and the findings are based on fairly small numbers of cases from the early days of the pandemic. This fall, the U.S. government will be doing national surveys, coinciding with a major vaccination campaign, to better track swine flu trends, which should provide more reliable information about how the virus is affecting different groups of people.