ABSTRACT

The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not collecthealth data according to economic class.1 Instead, we report almost every morbidity and mortality statistic by race. Yet, to elucidate how race figures in American epidemiology is a daunting task. We epidemiologists have yet to define what we mean when we examine ‘race’ (or ‘ethnicity’, as we usually call it now). And the epidemiologic literature is hot with controversy over how to handle race in health research.