Reducing Health Disparities in Alabama's Black Belt

Center for Excellence in Public Health and Bioethics

Funded by the

National Center on Minority Health and Health

Disparities (NCMH & HD), National Institutes of

Health (NIH)

ABSTRACT

Tuskegee University, the applicant institution, proposes partnering with The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, the collaborating institution, to establish Tuskegee's Center for Rural Health Disparities in Alabama's Black Belt. The overall goal of the Center is to identify and reduce (if possible eliminate) the underlying causes of higher levels of disease and disability in racial and ethnic minorities in the Black Belt region of Alabama.   The so-called "Black Belt Counties" of the South stretch through parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Many of the residents of the Black Belt counties of Alabama are poor, low-income earners, uneducated and have limited access to health care.   Tuskegee University proposes a Center composed of the following components:

1) Administrative Core,

2) Shared Resource core,

3) Research Component Core,

4) Community Outreach and Information Dissemination Core,

5) Pilot Research Component Core,

6) Public Health and Bioethics Education and Training Component Core, and

7) Minority Health and Health Disparity Education.

In concert with education and service Tuskegee will emphasize biomedical and behavioral research with a focus on prevention and control. The two collaborating universities, Tuskegee through its National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care and the University of Alabama through its Institute for Rural Health research in partnership with NIH's National Center on Minority Health Disparities are expected to contribute to the enhancement of human health with a focus on biomedical and behavioral research.