Health Disparities
- Howard Frumkin, director, National Center for Environmental Health
- M.C.
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| Environmental Policy and Health Disparities | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Introduction | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| From the Artist | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Artist Bio | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| �What it all comes down to is how we use our land and whether or not people have access to clean water. These issues, like everything else, it seems, ultimately intersect with medicine. But the question is, how?� |
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| Guest Artists | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Program Notes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| So said a law professor when I asked for his thoughts on the most important issue in public health. Back then, as an aspiring physician, I had no idea how much his words would challenge my way of thinking about healthcare. Land use and water quality, I thought, were issues best left to lawyers and urban planners�not to future health providers such as myself. Indeed, true to my professional calling, I had already started to think in terms of disease, focusing only on public health solutions involving access to drugs or patient education about symptoms.
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| Environmental Policy and Health Disparities |
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| Projeto Quixote | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I would soon discover that this professor was the director of a program designed to encourage interdisciplinary approaches to social, economic, and environmental problems in urban settings. Now in its second year, the Georgia State University Summer Legal and Policy Study in Rio de Janeiro has been an opportunity for students of law, public health and other disciplines to learn from the challenges currently facing Brazil and to apply those lessons to similar issues present in the United States. As he told me more about the program, I found myself wondering what it was about Brazil that made it such an ideal place to study the problems of urban growth. My search for answers revealed everything from the plight of the disease-ridden favelas in Rio de Janeiro to the escalating rates of obesity and diabetes in all major urban areas. Time and again, issues around land use and water quality cropped up as the main culprits behind this problem, and I found myself becoming deeply invested in studying the environmental relationship of land and water to health. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| "The people who build, shape, zone, and regulate our environment are public health colleagues of ours. We need to sit at the table with them, so that health is considered when decisions are made." - Howard Frumkin, director, National Center for Environmental Health |
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| Acknowledgements | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Links | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Over the next few months, I began to see these environmental factors in action both in the clinic and in my work as a public health research fellow. It was in the fact the patients in my volunteer diabetes education class had no time to exercise after spending three hours a day idling in traffic. It was also in the fact that in rural Alaska, rates of type 2 diabetes are skyrocketing because people in certain villages rely on mass shipments of soda for potable drinking water (see photograph). These instances became clear examples to me of how important the environment is to the preservation of health and society�topics of which are inevitably the concern of lawyers, doctors, and policymakers alike.
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| Above: Soda--a �quick-fix� solution for lack of potable water. However, these �gifts� from the Westernized world are part of the reason for the steep increase in the prevalence of diabetes and obesity in the Native population. (Photo by M. Chang) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Out of these experiences comes a newfound desire not only to learn more about environmental issues, but also to unite the perspectives of clinical medicine with law. This benefit concert and my future participation in the Brazil program are part and parcel of that desire. As I now know, answering the �how� of the relationship between environmental law and medicine is a challenge still waiting to be met. Whether the issue at stake is land, water, or any other resource, it is important that physicians and lawyers work together, if for no other reason than that both professions are fundamentally concerned with human rights. It is my hope that working with law students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil will allow me to be part of a new generation of physicians, trained to understand the world�s problems from an intersection of perspectives rather than from the point of view of one profession alone.
- M.C. |
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| For more information about the program, visit: http://law.gsu.edu/rio | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| To learn more about my interest in health disparities, click here to download a PowerPoint presentation that I gave for the Student Health Law Association at Georgia State University. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||