Ethnic inequalities in health: a review of UK epidemiological evidence

Abstract

Associations between ethnicity and health status have been noted from the time when quantitative health data were first recorded. Thus in 1845 Frederich Engels noted the poor health and mortality record of the Irish living in England.1 Engels also drew attention to the miserable social and environmental circumstances in which the majority of the Irish population lived and it is clear that he considered these to underlie their poor health. Similarly, in a 1916 report from the US, John W. Trask concluded that the lower death rates among white people than black people reflected more favourable socioeconomic circumstances, rather than any inherent ethnic differences.2 Since then the complex interrelationships between ethnicity, social position and health have remained a central concern of studies in this area, as the material presented in this chapter indicates. The approach we have taken is an epidemiological one. Descriptive epidemiology provides data on how disease, disability and death are distributed between and within populations. Analytical epidemiology aims at uncovering the causes of disease and thus the reasons for the distribution of disease that are seen. Epidemiological studies concerned with ethnicity have taken both descriptive and analytical approaches. There are now extensive data demonstrating differentials in health status between ethnic groups and a growing body of literature analysing the contribution of socioenvironmental factors to this.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.