I’m starting off slow today with postings (it’s been a lil while). Warming up .

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(LATimes.com) Thousands of Latino patients stream though the East Los Angeles practice of Dr. Hector Flores and his partners each year.

The older ones go to the family practice with arthritis and hypertension, the younger ones with diabetes and asthma.

What surprises Flores, however, is not how sick they are, it is how sick they are not.

Overall, Flores said, his patients are much healthier than one would expect given their low levels of income and education, factors epidemiologists long have known are linked to poor health.

“You can predict in the African American population, for example, a high infant mortality rate,” he said recently, “so we would think a [similarly] poor minority would have the same health outcomes.

“But they don’t. They’re not there,” he said, referring to outcomes among Latinos.

Why Latinos aren’t sicker  a phenomenon known to health experts as the Latino paradox  is puzzling to public health experts, given the link between disadvantage and high disease and mortality rates.

In overall mortality rates and infant mortality rates, two standard measures of a population’s health, Latinos’ numbers approach and sometimes surpass those of whites. (more…)