Children of Katrina still are suffering, By Janet McConnaughey and Lindsey Tanner (AP), August 24, 2010, Detroit Free Press: “A startling number of children displaced by Hurricane Katrina still have serious emotional or behavioral problems five years later, a new study found. More than one in three children studied — those forced to flee their homes because of the August 2005 storm — have been diagnosed since then with mental health problems. These are children who moved to trailer parks and other emergency housing. Nearly half of the families studied still report household instability, researchers said. ‘If children are bellwethers of recovery, then the social systems supporting affected gulf coast populations are still far from having recovered from Hurricane Katrina,’ the researchers said. The study was published online Monday in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Lead author David Abramson of Columbia University in New York said researchers were astonished by the level of distress…”
Category: Environment
Disadvantaged Communities and Health of Black and Latino Boys
The importance of healthy communities for boys of color, By Marian Wright Edelman, July 22, 2010, Madison Times: “A new report was released in June that sheds a sobering light on how many Black and Latino boys grow up in communities that are, in a number of ways, dangerous to their health. Called “Healthy Communities Matter: The Importance of Place to the Health of Boys of Color,” the report contained contributions from scholars and researchers at the RAND Corporation, PolicyLink, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, and the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice and the Department of Emergency Medicine at Drexel University. It was funded by the California Endowment. Some of its data and best practices focus on California but the lessons learned apply to communities across the country. The researchers found that boys and young men overall experience worse health outcomes than girls, that these health disparities are even more profound for Black and Latino boys, and that many of these disparities can be connected to community patterns. As they explain: “Negative health outcomes for African-American and Latino boys and young men are a result of growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, places that are more likely to put boys and young men directly in harm’s way and reinforce harmful behavior…”
Haiti Earthquake and the Displaced
In Haiti, the displaced are left clinging to the edge, By Deborah Sontag, July 10, 2010, New York Times: “Hundreds of displaced families live perilously in a single file of flimsy shanties planted along the median strip of a heavily congested coastal road here called the Route des Rails. Vehicles rumble by day and night, blaring horns, kicking up dust and belching exhaust. Residents try to protect themselves by positioning tires as bumpers in front of their shacks but cars still hit, injure and sometimes kill them. Rarely does anybody stop to offer help, and Judith Guillaume, 23, often wonders why. ‘Don’t they have a heart, or a suggestion?’ asked Ms. Guillaume, who covers her children’s noses with her floral skirt when the diesel fumes get especially strong. Six months after the earthquake that brought aid and attention here from around the world, the median-strip camp blends into the often numbing wretchedness of the post-disaster landscape. Only 28,000 of the 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the earthquake have moved into new homes, and the Port-au-Prince area remains a tableau of life in the ruins. The tableau does contain a spectrum of circumstances: precarious, neglected encampments; planned tent cities with latrines, showers and clinics; debris-strewn neighborhoods where residents have returned to both intact and condemnable houses; and, here and there, gleaming new shelters or bulldozed territory for a city of the future…”