Poverty, policy, and pathogenesis: Economic justice and public health in the US

Abstract

This paper addresses public health and access to care for the urban poor in the context of US urban, economic, and industrial policy. The pathogenic deterioration of 'inner city' neighbourhoods is a direct result of political and economic strategies to facilitate capital accumulation and consolidation, manifested in geographic patterns of uneven development that mirror the relationship between First and Third World countries. The deleterious public health effects of these trends include reduced access to care; medical indigence in the wake of deindustrialization and the restructuring of the blue-collar workforce; and the spread of social epidemics such as AIDS, violence, and substance abuse. Contemporary health policy and 'reform' debates, however, have virtually ignored the pathogenic role played by economic and social inequality in the etiology and dispersion patterns of disease. To confront the health crisis that currently threatens poor and minority communities in the US, economic justice must be explicitly acknowledged as a public health issue, alongside more traditional concerns such as access to care, immunization, vector control, and behaviour modification. It will be necessary to challenge political and economic policies that shore up corporate power at the expense of community development; spur capital accumulation at the expense of social programs and economic opportunity for the poor and politically disenfranchised; and actively facilitate the continued exploitation of, and withdrawal of resources from, the nation's most vulnerable citizens and their communities.