A Tale of Two Communities
NPR this morning had a blurb between news segments about the healthiest and unhealthiest communities in America. The healthiest community is Burlington, VT, where 92 percent of the population describe themselves in “good or great health.” A report by the Centers for Disease Control verifies it to be the case, so it’s not solely about the perceptions of the folks that live there.
Then NPR told us about the least healthy community in the country, Huntington, WV, where obesity rates and hence diabetes rates are abnormally high, and that many of the elderly don't have teeth. All these are signs of poverty, so I wondered why NPR didn’t say anything about poverty in the story. I went to the NPR website to see if I could find a transcript, but it’s evidently too early to get it; however, the website did post an AP story—which included the following details contrasing life in Burlington versus Huntington.
—Burlington is better off financially, with 8 percent living at the federal poverty level, compared to 19 percent in Huntington.
—It's much more educated, with nearly 40 percent of area residents having at least a college bachelor's degree. Only 15 percent in the Huntington area do.
It would have been helpful if NPR had included these details from the AP story because it would put the comparison of the two communities in context. It would have helped even more to explain that poor health, poverty and low levels of education often travel together.
In our next hunger report, released a week from today, we talk about using a more expansive framework in thinking about deprivation and social exclusion in the Untied States. It’s about more than just income-poverty, the framework we rely on in this country. Anyone who studies or works on issues related to human development understands that health and education are inseparable from poverty and hunger, that you rarely find one without the other, and it makes a whole lot of sense to address these problems together, as the Millennium Development Goals do. And it would make sense to do so right here in the United States.


