By Doug Miller

The possibility that the H1N1 virus — commonly mis-identified as the “swine flu” — will reach epidemic proportions has schools , hospitals and other public agencies and private companies alike taking concerted and highly visible precautions.

While the virus doesn’t differentiate by skin color or ethnicity, many urban neighborhoods do, and that, according to some preliminary reports, may mean African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately susceptible to the disease.

“We have more questions than answers at the moment,” said Arleen Porcell-Pharr, a public affairs specialist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. “Some data [about the ethnic propensities of the H1N1 virus] from local jurisdictions has been published in peer-review journals,” she said, “but it’s going to be difficult to get enough data of high quality to answer the question for the nation as a whole.”

One local jurisdiction that has reported higher instances of H1N1-related hospitalizations based on ethnicity is Boston. More than three out of four Bostonians hospitalized by the virus have been either black or Latino, according to a Boston Public Health Commission official recently cited by the Boston Globe. Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the commission, told the newspaper she incorrectly thought “people were getting sick everywhere at the same level, but it wasn’t true. Some of our neighborhoods were much more impacted by this.”

Dorchester, East Boston and Roxbury—communities densely populated by blacks and, in the case of East Boston, immigrants from Latin America—appear to be especially vulnerable to the disease. Specialists enumerating swine flu cases in August found that out of 71 Boston residents hospitalized by the virus, 49 percent were African American and 28 percent were Latino. The rates at which patients of both ethnicities had been hospitalized with the disease essentially were double their percentage of the overall population.

New York City health officials reported widespread H1N1 infection rates in May and June of this year, relying on telephone surveys to arrive at an estimated figure of 750,000 to 1,000,000 cases. But a spokesperson for the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said the agency’s numbers aren’t broken down by race or ethnicity, so there’s no statistically sound way to determine whether blacks or Latinos are being disproportionately affected.

Trust for America’s Health, a non-profit research and study group, has determined, however, that African and Latino Americans are more likely to develop severe cases of H1N1 because they suffer disproportionately from chronic health conditions such as diabetes and asthma, ailments that over the years have been linked to poor housing and lower economic status.

As reported by HealthDay News, the Trust for America’s Health study also touched on what the organization called major deficiencies in systems designed to reach minority communities with news about influenza flare-ups or preventive measures. Emergency preparedness information, for example, often is disseminated via the internet, but residents in low-income neighborhoods often don’t have access to the internet. Availability of non-English information about the virus also is limited.

Dr. Anita Barry, disease investigator with the Boston Public Health Commission, added one other element to what could prove to be a particularly toxic mix for minorities: high ethnic concentrations in urban public schools. “We know that school-aged children were primarily affected by H1N1,” she told the Globe. In the Boston public school system, the highest percentage of students are minorities. According to the CDC, at least 76 American children have died from the H1N1 virus since April.

While many experts contend that the H1N1 virus doesn’t appear to be more dangerous that other flu strains, kids seem to be catching it more easily than seasonal flu. And for minority students whose chances of having asthma and diabetes already are high, that could spell trouble.

Doug Miller is a writer living in Westchester County, New York.