Place Matters When it Comes to Life and Death
The recent shooting death of 16-year-old Ra-Heem Jackson near his home in the Congress Heights community of Washington, DC, is a health equity issue. Where Ra-Heem lived proved as significant to his health as his genetic code. The high school honors student and athlete had to navigate crime-ridden streets to get home from school in the shadowy hours of dusk. He knew danger lurked in the troubled streets of his zip code. He had been robbed once coming home from school after basketball practice. He bought a gun to protect himself from another robbery. It didn’t work out.
The groundbreaking PBS documentary series Unnatural Causes, Is Inequality Making Us Sick? makes the point that your address is a good indicator of your health. “Housing policy is health policy. Neighborhood improvement policies are health policies. Everything that we can do to improve the quality of life for individuals in our society has an impact on their health and is a health policy,” says Harvard’s David Williams, PhD, one of America’s leading experts on health equity and disparities.
As the series urges, to improve the health and health care of all Americans, we must go beyond linking health to medical care, lifestyles and genes to explore evidence of other more powerful determinants: the social conditions in which we are born, live and work.
America, let’s move fast to create cross-cutting public policy that nurtures the health and wellbeing of all. No more tragic deaths, please!
For more on "Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick" visit:
Highlighted Clip for Tuesday, April 19, 2011:
"Emancipation is hard to celebrate when kids are still slave to city’s violence"
By Courtland Milloy
And it came to pass that many African American youths could not celebrate D.C. Emancipation Day on Friday. For a plague of violence had been visited upon them. And the soil once toiled by slaves was soaked with the blood of free-born blacks.
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