News articles that stress African-American health disparities, like higher cancer mortality rates than other groups, may discourage black patients from being screened for cancer, according to a Saint Louis University study.

A new American Cancer Society study finds that recent progress in closing the gap in overall cancer mortality between African Americans and whites may be due primarily to smoking-related cancers, and that cancer mortality differences related to screening and treatment may still be increasing.

A study surveying patients in more than 1,500 physician practices has found racial and ethnic disparities in patient health-care experiences, with minority patients having worse experiences than white patients. The findings suggest that while all doctors should be attentive to differences in patient experiences, Hispanic, Native American, and black patients are often visiting physician practices that are less patient-centered.

Experts from the Center for Minority Health (CMH) at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health will address the successes and challenges of reducing health disparities at the American Public Health Association 136th Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Diego, Oct. 25 to 29. Faculty will present innovative programs that improve the health and well-being of racial and ethnic minorities.

If we want to fully understand the allure of pharmaceuticals, we need to look beyond both medical efficacy and profit motives. A new study in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics shows that when we use claims about drugs in arguments about racial identity, the meaning of both the pharmaceuticals and of race remain unsettled.

Two new articles examine the theory of "fetal programming" and their effect on racial health disparities.

Black Americans have a higher occurrence of colon polyps, according to a new study. This is a significant finding considering the incidence of colon cancer among black men has increased and remained unchanged among black women during the last 20 years.

Black women are less likely than white women to receive radiation therapy after a lumpectomy, the standard of care for early stage breast cancer, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Black patients are more likely to die in the early stages of chronic kidney disease than whites, according to a new study by a Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) researcher and his team that will be published in the July issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

A University of Maryland study of whether people receive different quality of hospital care because of their race or ethnicity found that when whites and minorities are admitted to a hospital for the same reason, they receive the same quality care in that hospital.

The UCLA Department of Family Medicine, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has launched the Network for Multicultural Research on Health and Healthcare, a group that will study health care disparities affecting minorities with chronic diseases.

In the public health field, there is an ongoing debate as to whether improvement in the overall health of the population is linked to increases or decreases in social inequities in health, that is, the inequities between higher-income and lower-income groups or people of different race/ethnicities.