Despite living in the area of nearly 1,700 nonprofits, three hospitals and countless medical providers, minorities in Hamilton County experience much higher rates of disease and poor health than their white counterparts. But some members of Chattanooga’s religious community want to change those statistics.
Representatives from 13 different local churches gathered at Cempa Community Care on Saturday to begin forming a Faith-based Health and Wellness Council. The group wants to leverage Chattanooga’s strength as a churchgoing city in order to stamp out health disparities.
“We want to educate our people, empower our people,” said LaDarius Price, Cempa community outreach manager. “You can’t live the life that God’s called you to live unless you have health, and that’s on every front – physical, spiritual, emotional, financially.”
In Hamilton County, black people die from diabetes at a rate 2.7 times higher than that of white people, heart disease at 1.2 times higher, and kidney disease at 3.6 times higher. They’re also more likely than white people to die from stroke, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and homicide, according to the latest available Chattanooga-Hamilton County Health Department data.
The statistics for infectious diseases are also grim. Blacks and Latinos make up about 22 percent of Tennessee’s population, yet account for nearly 61 percent of those in the state living with HIV, according to 2015 data from AIDSVu, a project of Emory University and Gilead Sciences.