Probing the Roots Of Race and Cancer

摘要

Chicago, Illinois—The breast cancer patients Olufunmilayo Olopade saw as a resident at Cook County Hospital in Chicago reminded her of home. In her native Nigeria, as in the Chicago, Illinois, neighborhoods served by Cook County, the women she saw with breast cancer were often poor, black, unusually young, and very ill. Chicago was a world apart from the Lagos that Olopade had left behind in 1982. She had come to the United States to collect a brother who had dropped out of graduate school. Instead, she wound up settling in this snowy city. Working at Cook County, she became intrigued by the cancer parallels: Often the tumors were aggressive, the patients were young, and, in racially diverse Chicago, they were disproportionately of African descent. "What is this about?" she remembers thinking.