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According to a study in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health, African Americans do not receive the same healthcare as whites. The study estimates more than 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same care as whites, and that technological improvements in medicine averted just 176,633 deaths during the same period.

The study compiled and examined data drawn from the National Center for Health Statistics. The lead author and director of research at Virginia Commonwealth University''s Department of Family Medicine said in a telephone interview that the study''s results means “five times as many lives can be saved by correcting the disparities [in care between whites and blacks] than in developing new treatments.”

Coauthor, former U.S. surgeon general and current director of the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine, David Satcher, says that despite advances in medical research “if you didn''t focus more on the translation of that into especially the populations that tended to be left behind…you were not going to get as much out of the research as you would otherwise.”

The reduced access to healthcare African Americans were shown to have in the study does not account for all the racial disparity in preventable deaths, including greater incidence of some diseases, education, income level and environment. The study authors said the challenge, despite the varying factors, is to deliver an equal quality of healthcare to everyone.