Wide Ethnic Health Disparities Found in County

The remarkable diversity of Los Angeles County has been quantified in many ways. Add another: the health of its residents.

A new portrait of the county’s health, issued last week by the county Department of Health Services, makes clear that Angelenos live and die in ways that vary widely by race, ethnicity and lifestyle.

Whites, Asian Americans and African Americans are twice as likely as Latinos to suffer from heart disease, for instance. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are more than seven times as likely as whites to have tuberculosis. Latinos are almost three times as likely as whites to think their health is only “fair” or “poor.”

These disparate bits of information, and many more, have been assembled from a variety of studies conducted over the last several years to form “The Health of Angelenos,” the department’s report, which its authors hope will serve as a blueprint for attacking the county’s health problems.

“This isn’t information to ooh and aah at alone,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the county’s health officer and director of public health. “It’s information to take action on.”

He said the report was important--not because the data in it were new or necessarily groundbreaking, but because the document brought together for the first time a wealth of information about the state of county residents’ health.

Fielding said he hoped the report would “basically encourage everybody who’s concerned about this to take a very broad view about what determines health.”

He said the report was notable for exposing “very substantial disparities” among the city’s ethnic groups. He pointed in particular to the difference in heart disease mortality rates: African Americans in Los Angeles County are almost twice as likely as whites and three times as likely as Latinos or Asian Americans to die from heart disease.

“These are enormous disparities,” Fielding said.

African Americans also have the highest rates of mortality from cancer, diabetes, homicide and traffic accidents, the report says. Whites have the highest suicide rate.

One of the most interesting measures included in the report is “self-perceived health status,” or what people think about their own health. According to a 1997 county health study never before publicly released, 30% of Latinos consider their health to be fair or poor, compared with 27% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, 18% of African Americans and 12% of whites.

Cheryl Wold, an epidemiologist at the health department, said it wasn’t clear whether that means that Latinos and Asian Americans are sicker than African Americans and whites or that they simply set higher standards for what constitutes good health. However, she said there was no evidence that Asian Americans, for instance, have poorer health in general than whites.