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Page 1 of 2 In a city that celebrates its unique demographic makeup, diversity poses a challenge in one important area.
Understanding the health of Cambridge residents is complicated by the multicultural population, with large blocks of young and old residents. But the recent release of two reports by the Cambridge Public Health Department, in conjunction with various local organizations and community groups, sheds light on the dimensions of the issue.
The reports, one on men's health disparities and the other on the status of women and girls, are both "part of a project we started last year to look at the needs of the community," said Claude-Alix Jacob, the city's chief public health officer. "We want to make sure that people are aware of relative gaps in health across genders, race, and ethnicity."
"The data helps us as we design programs and think about policy," said Kimberly Sansoucy, who directs the city commission that was involved with the creation of the report on the status of women.
Among the more eye-catching findings in the women's report was that 47 percent of women in Cambridge diagnosed with HIV develop AIDS within three months, a rate "significantly higher than the statewide average and also higher than men," Sansoucy said.
Such findings act as a starting point for discussion about how to deliver effective healthcare programs in a city with a disproportionately high student population (almost one in three residents is between the ages of 20 and 29); a racial composition that has diversified dramatically in the past four decades (in 1970, 91 percent of the city's residents were white; in 2000, this had dropped to 68 percent); and a high immigrant population (one out of every four Cantabrigians is foreign-born).
"Are there immigrant women who come into the country with HIV who are not then treated once they arrive here?" said Sansoucy , enumerating a list of hypothetical explanations for the anomaly. "Is it because women with HIV are isolated within their communities, because they don't have access to healthcare, because of cultural differences where women do not have as much independence or are not allowed to seek treatment? Those are the questions we hope to spur with public health officials."
"Part of this is figuring out how we tailor our outreach to not only the lower socioeconomic status, but also to some of the other immigrants that are here," Jacob said. The city's newcomers include a high number of students, and Cambridge residents overall, he said, "have a higher educational status" compared to the rest of the state "because we've got the titans of the academic community here."
This high student population affects how data can be interpreted, said Andy Ellingson, who contributed to epidemiological research for the men's health report. "For all the comparisons, we have to adjust for age because we have so many students between Harvard and MIT . . . If you compare a city of 30-year-olds to a city of 80-year-olds, you're naturally going to have a higher death rate among the 80-year-olds. Age-adjusting helps compare apples to apples."
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Men's Health 
