By Alan Bavely
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY — It’s a life or death situation: Your heart stops pumping blood. You need CPR to survive, but will you get it? It may depend on the wealth or the racial makeup of the neighborhood you’re in.
That is the disturbing finding of a study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. It found that people who went into cardiac arrest in a poor, black neighborhood were half as likely to get CPR from a bystander before emergency personnel arrived as were people in middle-income or wealthier white neighborhoods.
“If you are in a black neighborhood or a poor neighborhood, it was one strike against you,” said Paul Chan, a heart specialist at St. Luke’s Hospital and one of the study researchers. “If you were in a poor and black neighborhood, it was two strikes against you.”
Full Story: Can a neighbor save you? CPR numbers reveal disturbing discrepancies