YSPH lecturer Shelley D. Geballe familiarized incoming students this week with some alarming trends in Connecticut, the state that will be their home for the next two years.
Despite its reputation for country clubs and venture capital, Connecticut is marked by sharp differences in income and educational achievement, both of which contribute to significant health disparities amongst the state’s 3.6 million residents, Geballe, J.D., M.P.H., told the gathering in Winslow Auditorium.
These differences cut along racial and ethnic lines and African-American and Hispanic residents, many of whom are concentrated in the state’s cities (Hartford, Bridgeport and Yale’s home of New Haven, among others) have health outcomes that are worse in almost every category than their peers: far higher rates of cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, infant mortality, obesity, asthma and new cases of HIV/AIDS, she said.
And the problem may be getting worse. Recent data suggests that the health gap between the rich and poor, suburban and urban in Connecticut is growing wider. Addressing this situation will require sustained input from many, including the next generation of public health students being trained at Yale today.
“This 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is a great time to pause and give thanks for the progress we’ve made in reducing the blatant injustices that existed in our nation five decades ago,” she said. “But it also is a time to be sobered by those injustices that persist in less obvious, but no less insidious, forms. May this new group of YSPH students now take up the cause.”