Consumer Health Foundation

By Margaret O’Bryon, President and CEO, Consumer Health Foundation

Poverty is bad for our health. Low-income communities and communities of color get sick more often, more quickly, and die at younger ages on average than those in more affluent and predominantly white communities. Children living in poverty are seven times more likely to be in poor or fair health than children in high-income households. In the Ward 7 in the District, mortality rates from the ten leading causes of death—including heart disease, cancer, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS—are roughly twice as high as in Ward 3.

This means that if we really want to attack the most serious health issues in the District, we need a wholistic approach that also takes into account the economic health of our city’s neighborhoods and families. That is why the Consumer Health Foundation is one of the many supporters of Defeat Poverty DC, an effort to get candidates for office in the District to explain what they would do to attack poverty in the city.

An often over-looked link between poverty and compromised health is chronic stress. Low-income families live every day with the stress that comes from not being able to get their basic needs met. Stress caused by living in unsafe and unhealthy neighborhoods. Stress caused by lack of access to healthy and affordable food. Stress because they often times lack a sense of having control over their environments, over their futures.
  
That stress causes more than mental strain.  It has concrete and adverse effects on the physical health of poorer communities.  Chronic stress produces high levels of the hormone cortisol, which has been linked to heart attacks, hypertension, impaired cognitive performance, and lowered immunity, which decreases the body’s ability to fight infection and illness.

In other words, persistent, poverty-induced stress puts people at significantly elevated risk for poor health. This factor alone may account for the vastly disproportionate disease and death rates experienced by DC residents living only 11 miles apart—those relatively healthy residents of affluent Friendship Heights compared to the more chronically unhealthy and low-income residents of Benning Heights.

Given the biological pathways through which poverty harms our physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being, eliminating poverty through multiple, interconnected strategies is, indeed, the best cure for improving the health of our neighbors.

To save lives and improve the health of all DC residents—indeed all residents throughout our region—we must improve the conditions in which we live, grow, work, and play. Public policies affecting income inequalities and wealth, educational attainment and occupational mobility must also be addressed. Creating a clear strategy and building political will to tackle these challenges is the first step.

We are fortunate, therefore, that Defeat Poverty DC is working to bring greater focus during the 2010 election season and beyond to the damaging effects of poverty on our entire city. The campaign is clear on how to defeat poverty:  Make work possible, make work pay, and make basic needs affordable. Defeating poverty will have ripple effects throughout our community – not the least of which is improving community and individual health.