Happy to share this important blog post from Gail Rae-Garwood, a fellow advocate, in honor of Black History Month. Given that African Americans are so disproportionately affected by chronic kidney disease, the low representation among nephrologists is all the more unfortunate. In August, we celebrate Minority Awareness Month, and March is National Kidney Month, but kidney disease is a reality for millions of African Americans all year long.
I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten all about Black History Month. Not at all, dear readers, not at all. It’s just that since this is a yearly occurrence and I’ve been blogging about kidney disease for 14 years, it becomes harder and harder to uncover Black nephrologists I haven’t written about before. Of course, including current Black nephrologists changes the picture somewhat. This year, I turned to Blackamericanweb for some help and found it,
“Dr. Velma Scantlebury [Gail here: sometimes she is referred to as Scantlebury-White.] is the first African American female transplant surgeon in America. She is currently the associate director of the Kidney Transplant Program at Christiana Care in Delaware. [Gail here again: actually, she retired last year.] With more than 200 live donor kidney transplants under her career, she holds extensive research credit in African American kidney donation led by Northwestern Medicine Transplantation Surgeon Dinee C. Simpson, MD, Dr. Scantlebury…
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