Report: Native Hawaiian men in worse health than woman

the associated press

HONOLULU — The state Office of Hawaiian Affairs has released a report concluding that Native Hawaiian men are in considerably worse health than women.

The state office’s findings were released last week, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported.

Native Hawaiian women have lower rates of obesity, asthma, deaths from cancer and mental health problems and have longer life expectancies, according to the report.

The report also said Hawaiian children are more likely to come from single-parent households than other children in Hawaii and experience disproportionately high levels of child abuse and neglect.

Much of the report’s data comes from annual state Department of Health surveys.

“But they don’t disaggregate it, they don’t break it down by ethnic group or gender, so we had to do that,” said Kamana’opono Crabbe, OHA’s chief executive officer. “It was a multiyear process to get that information, and once we were able to obtain the data files, we were able to distill it down into our own analysis.”

The report links many of the health problems to the changes that transformed life in the islands following Western contact in the late 1700s and the subsequent influx of immigrants that dramatically changed the cultural landscape for Native Hawaiians.

It calls for better policies and programs to provide “holistic interventions” rather than “a more traditional, siloed approach of education, early detection, and treatment.”

The report is said to build upon the E Ola Mau study, which was written in the 1980s and led to the passage of the federal Native Hawaiian Health Act.

The document recommends a further statewide study to produce a complete data set, including information on cultural practices and values to enable researchers to begin to make correlations between various social causes of poor health of Native Hawaiian men.

OHA is developing a report on the health of Native Hawaiian women, scheduled for release in May.