Dunbar provided more than curative medicine. It also offered preventive care, professional training and organized advocacy. It was led largely by members of W. E. B. Du Bois' "Talented Tenth," a cadre of educated and socially conscious Black Americans who advocated for marginalized Black Americans. Their efforts provide lessons for advancing health equity today.
Many other higher-income countries are grappling with rising obesity and diabetes, but the U.S. stands out for how consistently those risks translate into worse cardiovascular outcomes, and how wide the gaps are by income, race, ethnicity, and geography.
February is a time to honor Black history, resilience, and progress. It is also a moment to confront an uncomfortable truth: in New York City, equity in health, family stability, and community well-being is still shaped by race and zip code. For too many Black families, structural inequities continue to limit access to care, not because of individual choices, but because of where people live and how our systems are designed.
Alejandra's unwavering commitment to serving others is deeply inspiring, from her efforts to expand access to high-quality healthcare in historically underserved communities to her tireless advocacy for first-generation students,
Black Americans accounted for about 38 percent of HIV diagnoses among people aged 13 or older in the U.S. in 2023, the latest year for which data is available, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But they make up only about 14 percent of the population. The HIV diagnosis rate among Black Americans was 42 per 100,000 people, whereas the overall rate was 13.7 per 100,000. Black Americans accounted for 43 percent of HIV-related deaths among people aged 13 or older.
This past year underscored the importance of continually strengthening the organ donation and transplant system. In New York, our state and community leaders advanced meaningful reforms to save and heal lives, maintain public trust in the system, and honor donors and their families. As a result, more than 3,200 New Yorkers received life-changing organ transplants this year, and more than 400,000 New Yorkers newly registered their consent to give the gift of life.
In her 10 years as a health-care administrator, Cheryl Prescod has seen firsthand the ways Black Canadians can feel left behind by the blanket approach sometimes taken by the country's health-care system. As executive director at the Black Creek Community Health Centre in Toronto's Jane and Finch neighbourhood. Prescod serves a diverse clientele, including a large proportion of Black and racialized individuals people who say it can be difficult to access health care that makes them feel safe and culturally respected.
If you're smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, should you expect society to pay when you get sick?" He added that while Americans would always have the right to "eat donuts all day," nevertheless, "should you then expect society to care for you when you predictably get very sick at the same level as somebody who was born with a congenital illness?
Released last month, the study finds that nearly half of U.S. adults worry they won't be able to afford necessary medical care in the coming year, and one in five households reported being unable to pay for prescription medicine in the past three months. Another sobering point: about three in ten U.S. adults said that someone in their household went without needed medical care in the past year because they just couldn't afford it.
AI is no longer the future of healthcare; it's already reshaping how patients are diagnosed and treated. Some of the most interesting developments involve systems that sense and respond to human emotion. Cedars-Sinai's Connect platform, for example, adapts care based on patient sentiment; CompanionMx interprets vocal and facial cues to detect anxiety; and Feel Therapeutics uses emotion-sensing wearables to tailor interventions in real time.
Kara is not a lawyer. Her background is in public health and communications. Yet she now leads a company that has used AI to summarize more than 3.3 million judicial opinions and made them free and publicly available. In our conversation on "Notes to My (Legal) Self," she explained how justice, like health, is a public good. And access to law is one of its critical delivery systems.
A pathologist studies an extremely thin slice of human tissue under a microscope, searching for visual signs that reveal whether cancer is present and, if so, what type and stage it has reached. To a trained specialist, examining a pink, swirling tissue sample dotted with purple cells is like grading a test without a name on it -- the slide contains vital information about the disease, but it offers no clues about who the patient is.
"Research has become an increasingly more important component of medical training, both as an avenue for career development and to showcase ground-breaking insights," said Kelly Bachta, MD, PhD, associate director of Feinberg student research, director of AOSC and assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases.
Dozens of changes were quietly made this year to the National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers, which was first released in 2022 after years of work by government officials and community stakeholders. An objective to "prioritize efforts to advance equity for unserved and underserved populations of caregivers" was removed entirely, as was a section noting that the challenges of family caregiving are not equally distributed.
"We are honored to share the name and event details of Cycle to Zero with our community, so many who have been supporters of SFAF, long-time participants of AIDS/LifeCycle, and champions for our HIV and LGBTQ communities," said Tyler TerMeer, Ph.D., CEO of SFAF. "As our systems of public health care and funding for HIV and LGBTQ+ services continue to come under attack, now is the time for our communities to come together to protect and prioritize the health care and services we need."
"The asset of health is among the few, if not only, luxuries we enjoy in life. With access to better health and especially effective healthcare, we can manage life well and provide for ourselves, our families and our communities."
It begs the question, what does DEI mean to the issuers of this notice? Does it mean the term 'structural racism'? Does it mean 'Black Americans'? Does it mean that we can no longer do rigorous science to really understand why the devastating burden of health disparities exist in this country and around the globe?
