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Health Problems Take Root in a West Baltimore Neighborhood That Is Sick of Neglect [NYTimes.com]

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At 49, Annette Booth already feels old.

She is obese and has trouble walking a block, never mind playing with her grandchildren. She has had two knee replacements. She rattles when she breathes because of asthma, and takes about nine pills a day, including medications for anxiety and high blood pressure.

“I can’t walk too far,” she said. “If I do, I can’t breathe.”

In Upton-Druid Heights in West Baltimore — one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and, in recent days, the scene of some of its most vocal protests — the cost of long-term poverty is counted in lives. Its residents die from nearly every major disease at substantially higher rates than the city as a whole — nearly double the rate from heart disease, more than double the rate from prostate cancer, and triple the rate from AIDS. Life expectancy here is just 68 years, one notch above Pakistan.

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The fact that 94 percent of its population is black is lost on no one. “If the statistics that are present in these communities were present in any white community in Baltimore, it would be declared a state of emergency,” said Bishop Douglas Miles, the pastor at Koinonia Baptist Church in Northeast Baltimore. “Health disparities loom as a giant lurking in the shadows. They never get talked about.”

 

[For more of this story, written by Sabrina Tavernese, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04...sick-of-neglect.html]

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