Saving the Disadvantaged from Pollution
Skin color and wealth remain pervasive fault lines in U.S. society, as best proved by the persistence of economically and racially segregated communities. People living in these places face excessive stressors, including poverty, substandard housing, malnutrition and lack of health care. Environmental burdens–notably pollution from power plants, freeway corridors and chemical manufacturing plants–are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods.
Each of these inequalities is bad enough on its own. Yet the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine describes this combined exposure as “double jeopardy,” because social stressors can impair an individual’s ability to fend off illnesses that pollution creates or aggravates. Indeed, studies show that air pollution is more likely to cause respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as premature deaths, among people in lower socioeconomic groups. The combined threat is particularly hard on fetuses, infants and adolescents and on adults who have high blood pressure or diabetes. Individuals in poor rural areas, as well as in low-income urban communities such as Richmond, Calif., suffer disproportionately from childhood asthma, in part because of inadequate housing, deficient medical care and proximity to multiple sources of air pollution.
