- Study ties diabetic crises to dip in food budgets, By Sabrina Tavernise, January 6, 2014, New York Times: “Poor people with diabetes are significantly more likely to go to the hospital for dangerously low blood sugar at the end of the month when food budgets are tight than at the beginning of the month, a new study has found. Researchers found no increase in such hospitalizations among higher-income people for the condition known as hypoglycemia, suggesting that poverty and exhausted food budgets may be a reason for the increased health risk…”
- Doctors say cutting food stamps could backfire, By Lauran Neergaard (AP), January 9, 2014, Philadelphia Inquirer: “Doctors are warning that if Congress cuts food stamps, the federal government could be socked with bigger health bills. Maybe not immediately, they say, but over time if the poor wind up in doctors’ offices or hospitals as a result. Among the health risks of hunger are spiked rates of diabetes and developmental problems for young children down the road. The doctors’ lobbying effort comes as Congress is working on a compromise farm bill that’s certain to include food stamp cuts. Republicans want heftier reductions than do Democrats in yet another partisan battle over the government’s role in helping poor Americans…”
Tag: Disease
Poverty and Disease
Study links disease, poverty and biodiversity, By Kenneth R. Weiss, December 26, 2012, Los Angeles Times: “Poverty and disease often come together. That much is well understood. But how much does poverty foster disease? Or, how much can disease perpetuate poverty? And what’s the role of nature, given that so many infectious diseases are spread by mosquitoes or spend part of their life cycle outside of the human body? A new study finds that certain types of infectious and parasitic diseases have a significant influence on economic development across the world and accounts for some of the differences in per-capita income between those who live in countries in the tropics or those in temperate latitudes…”
Poverty and Tropical Diseases
Tropical diseases: The new plague of poverty, By Peter J. Hotez, August 18, 2012, New York Times: “In the United States, 2.8 million children are living in households with incomes of less than $2 per person per day, a benchmark more often applied to developing countries. An additional 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty. In the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, poverty rates are near 20 percent. In some of the poorer counties of Texas, where I live, rates often approach 30 percent. In these places, the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, ranks as high as in some sub-Saharan African countries. Poverty takes many tolls, but in the United States, one of the most tragic has been its tight link with a group of infections known as the neglected tropical diseases, which we ordinarily think of as confined to developing countries…”