April 21 the MMWR rejected a study draft on Black-disparity surveillance. Two named CDC voices, Fiona Havers and Deb Houry, said publicly that the rejection was editorial-not-scientific. We published on it this week because the version of CDC numbers we cite tomorrow may not be the version we cite today, and reader trust in our beat depends on naming that risk out loud.
Three pieces went live on blackhealth.org since the last note. Each gives the reader something to ask, do, or check.
1. Keloid evidence for Black skin
In a 2023 Detroit prospective cohort, 16% of Black women had ever had keloids. The 2024 meta-analysis the piece is built around shows that combination intralesional triamcinolone plus 5-fluorouracil produces more than three times the treatment efficacy of monotherapy. Three named voices anchor the piece: Susan Taylor at the Skin of Color Society, Temitayo Ogunleye at Penn Medicine, and Andrew Alexis at Weill Cornell.
The reader action embedded in the piece: ask the dermatologist about combination intralesional therapy specifically, not single-agent. If a clinician pushes back on combination, the piece names the stepwise pathway (silicone gel, intralesional, combination intralesional, excision plus adjuvant) so a reader knows where they actually are in the protocol.
2. Halle Berry, ReSpin, and the Black-women's-menopause care gap
In the SWAN longitudinal cohort, Black women report a median of 10.1 years of vasomotor symptoms. The all-cohort median is 7.4 years. The piece pairs Berry's ReSpin platform as the consumer-facing entry point with the AHA 2020 framing of menopause as a cardiovascular-disease window: midlife is when CVD risk in Black women starts pulling away from the trajectory other groups travel.
Three reader actions: ask for a midlife CVD risk assessment, the same conversation that a clinician would already be having with you about other risk factors; ask whether your provider screens for vasomotor-symptom duration and not just incidence; and check the directory for a Black OB-GYN or internal-medicine clinician who treats midlife as a load-bearing care window rather than a deferral target.
A note on the hero image: we swapped from a generic stock photo of a midlife Black woman to the Wikipedia lead photo of Berry herself this week, because celebrity-anchored profile pieces should show the named person. Catalog policy adjustment, applied going forward.
3. The MMWR cite-chain risk piece
The piece walks through three concrete cite-chain risks for Black-disparity surveillance: that publication-date drift between draft and final makes a Wednesday's CDC number not the same as Friday's; that data-tables can be edited without a public correction trail; and that a CDC employee resignation is often a forward indicator of a methodological argument that did not survive review. Three reader actions: name the publication date when citing CDC numbers in any forwarded message; cross-check MMWR figures against the underlying data on data.cdc.gov when the figure is doing real work in the argument; and watch for resignations as a signal, not a punchline.
This is the cite-discipline piece that differentiates our beat from upstream health press. If you forward one piece this week, this is the one.
Resources we trust
Our directory is in build-out. Until verified Black-clinician listings go live, three external resources have the receipts to be useful right now: the National Birth Equity Collaborative (birthequity.org) for maternal-health policy and clinical-training, Therapy for Black Girls (therapyforblackgirls.com) for the Black-women therapy directory anchored by Joy Harden Bradford's audience-focused work, and the Skin of Color Society (skinofcolorsociety.org) for derm-specific clinician finders given this week's keloid focus.
Same disclosure as last issue: we list these because their verification trails check out under our intake rubric, not because they sponsor anything here.
A closing question
If you have a keloid scar and have had a dermatologist push back on intralesional therapy, what did they offer instead? Write to hello@blackhealth.org. We read every response, and the patterns become reporting.
Until next week,
The Black Health Editorial team