Deaths by Poverty

A recent study released by The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health/funded by the National Institute for Health  shows a direct link between poverty and mortality in the United States.  While, of course, we all know this is the case, you would be hard-pressed to find a medical journal or research institute that could provide a statistical link between socioeconomic factors and physiological consequences (unless you were drawing the relationship between the two based on their data yourself).

After discussing the various social factors they would consider, Dr. Sandro Galea says that  “social causes can be linked to death as readily as can pathophysiological and behavioral causes.”

The study goes on to outline these relationships:

The investigators found that approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty.

When we combine this with the outpouring of poverty-related data since the onset of the economic recession, we can hypothesize that poverty-related deaths have increased along with the increase in the number and severity of impoverished persons.  The U.S. Census Bureau says that in 2009, the recorded number of persons in poverty (43.6 million) was the third consecutive year in which an increase was recorded, and it was also the highest level number of people in poverty in the United States since such estimates have been published.

American Progress released an article in 2009 that reported specifically upon women’s experiences with poverty.  At that time, women accounted for 59 percent of adults in poverty, and 74 percent of those women in poverty were unmarried (and with significantly higher poverty rates than married women).

I say all of this because I feel like all of the consequences of poverty are often discussed but that poverty itself is treated occasionally as a social justice issue in general (though perhaps one many folks feel is too big to tackle right now), but not often as a feminist issue.

I’m wondering what everyone’s thoughts on this are?  There is a great movement by the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) to institutionalize heterodox feminist economics programs, but I don’t often hear much about grassroots approaches to these issues.