Art, care centers offer promise for black community

Posted on By october

Two institutions, several miles apart – one newly formed and the other 70 years old – held celebrations last week, and both offer greater promise for African-Americans and the broad society.
The University of Illinois and the South Side Community Art Center share an import historic link to the African-American community through the arts and medicine.
On Friday, the Sickle Cell Center at University of Illinois opened an Adult Acute Care Center, at 1740 W. Taylor St. in Chicago, for patients suffering from sickle cell disease.
The Sickle Cell Center is the only one of its kind in Illinois and has nearly 40 years of experience in the management of SCD, providing care to more than 500 adult patients and 250 pediatric patients. The Acute Care Center is set up to provide immediate treatment for pain, a hallmark of SCD, improving pain relief for these individuals.
SCD is an inherited lifelong disease of the red blood cells and is a geographically based disease. It is geographically based as a result of the human body adapting to the prevalence of malaria. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes in warm tropical environments. In the United States, African-Americans are plagued by SCD because of the millions of Africans brought to this part of the world by the slave trade from West Africa.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is estimated that more than 80,000 Americans suffer from this devastating disease, with 97 percent of them of African descent. Here in Illinois, 75 percent of residents with SCD live in Cook County and 88 percent in the six-county Chicago metropolitan region.
Sickle cell sufferers are known to be severely hampered by these attacks, commonly known as “pain crisis,” and it is this pain that most often brings them to the emergency room.
Oftentimes these individuals must wait hours before being treated; this delay in treatment results in unrelieved pain and hospitalizations. The Acute Care Center provides immediate treatment for pain and allows them to return home rather than be hospitalized.
The Sickle Cell Center at the University of Illinois is an example of progress in the form of recognizing the needs of African-Americans, but also South Americans and people of Mediterranean descent who suffer from sickle cell anemia.

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