Paul Farmer on video

Earlier this month, Paul Farmer delivered a keynote address at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. The Heller School has posted a video of Farmer’s speech online, so you can see it too.

The talk focuses on the policy implications of global inequities in health. You will recognize the core arguments from our discussion of Infections and Inequalities, but the examples and evidence come largely from Farmer’s work since that book was published. (Those of you who attended Tracy Kidder’s talk two weeks ago will also recognize some of the photos.)

The best part, if you ask me, is the question and answer period — so hang in there through the end. What aspects of the talk do you find most compelling? In what ways does Farmer draw on his training in anthropology, not just in medicine?

Paul Farmer keynote address at the Heller School

Racial inequalities in exposure to tobacco advertising

Today’s New York Times has a short article about racial inequalities in exposure to tobacco advertising. The article is based on a new paper (PDF; subscription required) in Public Health Reports by Brian Primack and colleagues.

Racial inequalities in exposure to tobacco advertising

Among other things, Primack et al. identified five peer-reviewed studies that provided enough information to compute the density of tobacco advertisements by race. Pooling across these studies, Primack and colleagues found that there were 11.8 tobacco advertisements per 10,000 African American residents (95% CI 5.0-28.3), as compared to 4.5 per 10,000 white residents (95% CI 1.3-15.2). In other words, there were 2.6 times as many tobacco advertisements in predominantly black neighborhoods as there were in white ones. The confidence intervals on these estimates are large, mainly because one study of Boston neighborhoods observed a relatively small racial disparity. But even that study showed that tobacco advertisements are concentrated in predominantly poor, African American, and Latino neighborhoods.

This new paper by Primack and colleagues is important, because we know from other studies that smoking is the leading cause of disease burden in the United States. Primack and colleagues’ meta-analysis hints at how institutional racism shapes the distribution of disease in ways that people often overlook.