Poverty takes huge toll on health

Sep 10, 2007 04:30 AM
Gary Bloch
The Toronto Star

It is time to open a new front in the war on poverty.

The Canadian health-care system has devoted sizable energy and resources to reducing risks to our health over the past couple of decades. This effort has included large campaigns targeted at smoking, obesity and exercise.

Amazingly, we have largely ignored the one risk that surpasses all of these in its potential to cause ill health and its cost to our health system – poverty.

As a family physician, I see the health effects of poverty on a daily basis. One of my patients, "Sally," is a 37-year-old single woman working at a full-time minimum wage job in Toronto that provides her with $1,280 a month (and no benefits), $450 below the Statistics Canada poverty line.

She is currently healthy, but studies have shown that her poverty places her at a 300 per cent higher risk of developing diabetes and a 200 per cent higher risk of having a major episode of depression. Her risk of developing heart disease is about the same as if she had high blood pressure or was a smoker (both conditions into which we have pumped millions of health-care dollars for prevention). Her life expectancy is 1 1/2 years shorter, and her risk of dying from a chronic disease is 16 per cent higher per year than the average Canadian.

These are the kinds of numbers that usually make doctors, nurses, public health planners and health ministers jump into action. But we typically see poverty as a moral and political issue, not as a health risk.

Read the rest here.