Progress appears to be flagging in reversing racial health disparities

“Deaths of despair” among middle-aged white people, owing to suicides and the opioid crisis, may be diverting attention from stalled improvement in death rates for people from racial and ethnic minority groups, a new paper argues. Mortality rates among African Americans had been falling compared to white Americans, according to CDC figures, but that gap is widening. In 2016, mortality rates among African Americans, American Indians, and Alaskan natives remained higher than among whites in every age group. For infants and children, the rate for African Americans was more than twice as high. “Mortality trends among whites are important and influential to the overall mortality rate and racial/ethnic disparities, but they are not the whole story,” the researchers say.