- How to cut the cost of child poverty, to the health of kids and the community, By Brie Zeltner, June 16, 2015, Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Cleveland is awash in poor, sick kids. Poverty and poor health go hand in hand, and they’re costly — to the children and the rest of the community. Cleveland’s child poverty rate is 54 percent, second in the U.S. only to Detroit’s. Poor kids face assaults to their health that begin in the womb, and can last a lifetime. Many never make it past their first year; in some East Side neighborhoods the infant mortality rate exceeds Third World levels. They are more likely to be born premature; to die young; to be poisoned by lead, to suffer from asthma, diabetes and obesity…”
- Cost-effective way to prevent chronic asthma in kids has Cleveland roots, By Brie Zeltner, June 17, 2015, Cleveland Plain Dealer: “For decades, some of Cleveland’s most vulnerable children — those with severe, chronic asthma — have been caught in an expensive cycle of fear and frustration. They live in substandard housing surrounded by mold, cockroaches, dust, lead and secondhand smoke. They have expensive inhalers, drugs and breathing machines, but still they suffer potentially lethal asthma attacks…”
- Home visits clean up triggers for kids with chronic asthma, By Brie Zeltner, June 17, 2015, Cleveland Plain Dealer: “It’s a cold day in mid-December, and Akbar Tyler stands in the kitchen of a two-story colonial in the West Side Brooklyn Centre neighborhood. He points to a line of white powder along the counter and floorboards. Roach poison. The oven is on, its door hanging open, in an attempt to heat the drafty room. ‘This is a problem,’ he says. Tyler is the healthy housing manager at Environmental Health Watch, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group based in Cleveland. For the past 15 years, he and a team from Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals, as well as local housing officials have used federal funding to help clean up breathing hazards in Cleveland homes…”
Tag: Cleveland
Child Poverty and Health
More than half of Cleveland kids live in poverty, and it’s making them sick, By Brie Zeltner, September 30, 2014, Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Census data released last week revealed a sobering truth about the conditions that face children growing up in Cleveland: more than half of the city’s kids—54 percent– live in poverty, the second highest rate of any big city nationally. As bad as that sounds, what’s worse is what it means: not only does poverty make it more difficult to secure stable, safe housing, nutritious food and quality, affordable daycare so that parents can work, but the daily stress kids endure under these conditions takes a huge toll on their mental and physical health, experts say. The kids pay this toll—in the form of asthma, diabetes, behavioral problems, truancy and failure in school. We pay it too, in higher healthcare costs as they become sicker adults, in the cost of incarceration for juvenile and then adult offenders, and in the lost productivity that results when such a large number of children cannot achieve. Some studies estimate that cost at roughly half a trillion dollars, or 3.8 percent of our nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), a year…”