The alarming news earlier this week that as many as 90,000 people could die from the swine flu this year has even more ominous implications for Blacks and Hispanics, a new Chicago study shows. By looking at 1,500 confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus reported to the Chicago Department of Public Health from late April through late July, researchers found that Blacks and Hispanics were four times more likely than their White counterparts to wind up in the hospital. But the wide disparity likely has very little to do with genetics, experts say. The fact that Blacks and Hispanics suffer disproportionately from diabetes, asthma is more likely the reason for the gap, they say. “We don’t have anything definitive to say one group is more affected than another,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study relied on a relatively small sample group. Of the 1,500 lab-confirmed swine flu cases, Blacks were hospitalized at a rate of nine per 100,000, Hispanics at eight per 100,000. For Whites, the rate was two per 100,000, according to the study. The Chicago study isn’t the first time race has been mentioned in context with the swine fle. In early August, health officials in Boston found that three-fourths of residents hospitalized with the virus were Black or Hispanic. “It’s very disturbing,” Barbara Ferrer of the Boston Public Health Commission, told The Associated Press. “But intuitively it’s understandable, because we have tremendous inequities in most areas of health,” said Ferrer, the agency’s executive director.

Sunday’s brutal beat-down of a Black man by four Hispanics was not a hate crime, argues a Latino advocacy group. On Wednesday, members of the group, Hispanics Across America, rallied in front of the New York deli where, according to police, a group of Hispanics beat up 52-year-old Darryl Jackson while yelling racial slurs, reports Newsday. But the public is just getting half of the story, the group’s president, Fernando Mateo said. He says the attack wasn’t motivated by race at all, and that Jackson was actually the one who threw the first punch. Click here.

The group swung bats and yelled racial slurs while attacking the man. Full story here.

You might not be a criminal, but if your Black or Latino that minor detail most likely won’t keep you from getting stopped by the NYPD. In fact, says the Center for Constitutional Rights, about 80 percent of the record half-million citizens who get stopped by New York City officers are either Black or Latino. And the vast majority of those stopped between 2005 and 2008 weren’t even charged with a crime, the center says in a new report. “The New York City Police Department continues to prey on African-American and Latino communities in New York City,” Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said. After tallying half of the data from 2008, the center projects that at its current pace, 543,982 people will be stopped over the entire year at this pace. “The problem actually is getting worse,” CCR lawyer Darius Charney said. But Commissioner Paul Browne, of the NYPD, said the number of Blacks and Latinos pulled over parallels the percentage offered by victims and witnesses of crime.

Sub-prime mess crushed Black America. Nobody got hit by the mortgage crisis like Blacks and Latinos. A study by the nonprofit United for a Fair Economy found that people of color lost an unbelievable $164 billion to $213 billion over the past eight years, thanks to the subprime lending mess. When you go to minority communities all over America, there is evidence of a dramatic economic distress, United concluded. There is an increase in abandoned homes, the devaluation of neighboring houses, increased crime, struggling commercial centers and tax base erosion, it found. “It’s important to realize just how much ground middle- and working-class Black Americans have lost in the subprime crisis,” said Amaad Rivera, a spokesman for United for a Fair Economy and co-author of the report. Rivera says that Blacks saw between $71 billion and $92 billion of their wealth dry up over the past eight years. Latinos, between $75 and $98 billion of wealth evaporated during the same time period. Why? The best answer is that they fell prey to predatory lenders, who disproportionately targeted them, the study says, noting that the subprime mortgage crisis will cost minority homeowners 40 percent more wealth than White homeowners in similar circumstances. “There’s no doubt in looking at the data … these predatory loans were targeted at racial minorities,” Austin King, a spokesman for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now told Black Voices. “Even when you zero out all the other factors like income and credit scores, even then a high-income African American was still as likely to be sold a subprime loan as a low-income White person.”

Georgia lawmaker says Black colleges unnecessary. In Georgia, where state officials are grappling with a $2 billion budget deficit, one lawmaker wants to merge to historically Black colleges with nearby White ones. Republican Seth Harp, who is chairman of the State Senate Higher Education Committee, says Harp. Harp believes that fusing the two campuses would save the cash-strapped Peach State millions and would allow Georgia to do away with what he contends are discriminatory institutions. But many Black educators, politicians and alumni say the historically Black colleges are serving a special need. “Historically Black institutions play a vital role in the community, the state and the nation,” said Dwayne Ashley, the president of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, which supports Black colleges. “They provide educations to a number of young men and women who might not otherwise attend college.” Joining Ashley is a host of other state officials, which is why the measure likely will not see the light of day. “This proposal would continue a long history of White officials implementing an economic plan that disintegrates institutions in the Black community,” said Ruby Sales, the founder of SpiritHouse Project, a social justice organization, drafted a petition to save the Black schools Sales. “Black educational history has been decimated under these types of desegregation plans.”

Eat what you want as long as you walk. You can eat basically anything you want and still lose weight if you religiously take a brisk 30-minute walk six days a week, according to researchers from the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. This amount of exercise is enough to trim your waistline and cut your risk of developing metabolic syndrome, a common condition linked to obesity and a sedentary lifestyle that raises the odds of heart disease, diabetes and stroke, reports Reuters Health. “Our study shows that you’ll benefit even if you don’t make any dietary changes,” study leader Johanna L. Johnson said in a statement. The Duke team examined results from the STRRIDE study (Studies of a Targeted Risk Reduction Intervention through Defined Exercise), which was funded by the National Institutes of Health. In this study, researchers observed 171 middle-aged and overweight men and women for the effects of varying amounts and intensity of exercise. They found that 41 percent of the participants had metabolic syndrome before they began exercising regularly. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of five conditions: a large waistline, high blood pressure, high levels of harmful triglycerides, low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol and high blood sugar. But after eight months of exercise, only 27 percent still had metabolic syndrome. “It’s … encouraging news for sedentary, middle-aged adults who want to improve their health,” Johnson said. “It means they don’t have to go out running four or five days a week; they can get significant health benefits by simply walking around the neighborhood after dinner every night.”
Double children’s Vitamin D intake, doctors advise. Children should be getting double the usually suggested amount of vitamin D because of evidence that it may help prevent serious diseases, the leading U.S. pediatricians group recommended on Monday.  To meet the new recommendation of 400 units daily, millions of children will need to take vitamin D supplements each day, the American Academy of Pediatrics said. That includes breast-fed infants – even those who get some formula – and many teenagers who drink little or no milk. Baby formula contains vitamin D, so infants fed only formula generally do not need supplements, the doctors said. However, the academy recommends that breast-feeding for at least the first year of life, and breast milk is sometimes deficient, reports The Associated Press. Most commercially available milk is fortified with vitamin D, but most children do not drink enough of it – four cups daily would be needed – to meet the new requirement, said Dr. Frank Greer, who helped write the report.

Text-driving is more dangerous than drunk driving. Young drivers are putting themselves in more danger than if they were driving drunk when they text behind the wheel, says a new study. Texting while driving – either reading a text or writing one – caused problems for a small group of young drivers (ages 17 to 24) who were studied while behind simulators in London. Reaction times slowed to 35 percent when they were writing or reading texts messages on their phones or handheld devices, the researchers found. By comparison, reaction time deteriorated 21 percent for people who had smoked marijuana and 12 percent who were driving legally drunk. Steering control also dropped a surprising 91 percent for text drivers compared to 35 percent for drunk drivers, the Transportation Research Laboratory – which carried out the study for the RAC Foundation – discovered. The tests also showed that texters were less able to maintain safe distances from other cars and they tended to drift out of their lane more often. RAC Foundation director Stephen Glaister said the research “clearly shows that a motorist who is texting is significantly more impaired than a motorist at the legal limit for alcohol.”

Vital Signs: Your finances and job can affect your health. With all that’s going on on Wall Street, there’s new evidence that a poor financial outlook can lead to all sorts of health problems. Vital signs has the results of two new studies, and some solid solutions offered by the non-profit arm of financial services company ING.

TV ads featuring HIV-positive Latinos will air. The Kaiser Family Foundation and Univision Communications Inc., the nation’s leading Spanish-language media company, have unveiled “SOY…” (“I AM…”), a groundbreaking Spanish-language media campaign featuring the personal stories of a diverse group of Latinos living with HIV and the people who love them. The campaign was previewed today for about 3,000 members of the HIV/AIDS community during the opening session of the 2008 United States Conference on AIDS (USCA) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Thursday. SOY… will debut nationally on Univision network and radio in conjunction with National Latino AIDS Awareness Day (NLAAD) on Oct. 15 and continue throughout 2009. The campaign was developed as part of ¡Entérate del VIH y SIDA! (Get the Facts about HIV and AIDS!), a long-standing public information partnership established in 2001 between Univision and the Kaiser Family Foundation to provide culturally relevant Spanish-language information and resources about HIV/AIDS.

Latinos, Blacks squeezed hard in tight job market.

As the nation’s job market grows tighter, Latinos and Black workers are suffering disproportionately, according to employment specialists and figures from the Department of Labor. While employment shrank by 51,000 jobs in July and nationwide joblessness rose to a four-year high of 5.7 percent, Latino unemployment was 7.4 percent last month, according to the Labor Department. Black joblessness was 9.7 percent in July. It was 9.2 percent in June. The overall teen jobless rate was 20.3 percent in July. It was 27.3 percent for Latino teens and 32 percent for Black teens. Analysts attribute much of the Latino job loss to ongoing contraction in the construction industry. A Labor Department report said the construction industry “has shed 557,000 jobs since its September 2006 employment peak, with nearly three-quarters of the decline occurring since October 2007.” A Pew report and other studies have found that for Black workers and their families, the picture is especially bleak. An Aug. 1 report by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress said that one in four Blacks lived in poverty in 2006. Black lost 55,000 jobs since December and wage growth continued its stall. “During the 2000s’ economic recovery, African American workers’ inflation-adjusted wages grew at an annual rate of only 0.2 percent, after having grown four times as much (0.8 percent) per year during the 1990s recovery,” the congressional committee reported. Between 2000 and 2006, median Black family income fell by 2.9 percent to $39,367, according to federal statistics.

Widow of slain Atlanta judge gets $5 million settlement. The widow of the Atlanta judge who was allegedly shot to death by a defendant during a daring escape from a courtroom three years ago will be paid more than $5.2 million by Fulton County. Under a settlement made public Thursday, Claudia Barnes, the wife of slain judge Rowland Barnes, the county will $5 million to settle lawsuits against itself and Sheriff Myron Freeman. The county will also pay a one-time annuity of $246,000 in a separate benefits case filed by Barnes, a former Fulton County employee. “I miss my husband every day, and this won’t take that away,” Barnes said Thursday. “I’ve had so many irons in the fire. This just closes another chapter of things I have to do.” Rowland Barnes was shot in March 2005 as he presided over a hearing involving convicted rapist Brian Nichols. The defendant allegedly wrested a sidearm from a deputy and shot to death the judge, a court reporter, a sheriff’s sergeant and, later, a federal agent. Nichols’ capital trial for the three deaths has been delayed several times. “Now I can focus all my attention on the criminal trial,” Barnes said.

Even the Klan ads didn’t help the Black challenger win. A nasty Democratic primary came to a close in Tennessee Thursday as the White incumbent congressman had a runaway win against his African-American challenger in a majority-Black district. Rep. Steve Cohen took an astounding 79 percent of the vote, compared with 19 percent for Nikki Turner, a Black lawyer, who throughout the campaign tried to convince voters that they should stick with their own race. In a particularly controversial campaign moment, Tinker ran an ad linking Cohen, a Jew, to the Ku Klux Klan. Sen. Barack Obama even entered the mix on that one, condemning the ad, which juxtaposed Cohen’s picture with that of a hooded Klansman. Cohen has long civil rights record. Just last month, he introduced a resolution to get Congress to issue an apology to African Americans for this nation’s imposition of slavery and Jim Crow.