Health Trends of Poor Detroit-Matt Ellison

I was able to talk to two professionals in the public health field from my hometown of Detroit, Michigan.  The first I spoke to was Liz Shane who is an epidemiologist in the Health and Wellness department of Detroit.  She told me about these these public health issues currently in Detroit:

                The deterioration of the homes in this very old city causes multiple health risks.  One of the huge factors involved with this is that because the houses are so old, there was much lead paint used when they were built.  The children she said suffer because of this paint in particular.  Lead affects their ability to pay attention and has shown to make them hyperactive.  This aggravates an already growing problem of children dropping out of school in Detroit.   These houses are so old they also have large portions of them that are deteriorating such as roofs and walls that are caving in. 

                The next big issue is obesity.  This enormous health issue comes from two others which are poverty and dangerous streets.  Growing up in Detroit, it was no mystery to me that my city struggled with this.  The annual Health Risk Behaviors survey for 2010 showed that 31.7% of adults in Detroit were considered obese.  This issue is a result of many factors, the biggest probably being poverty and a high homicide rate, which is itself a large health issue in Detroit.  Detroit remains as one of the top five most dangerous cities in the U.S.  People have to work two jobs to support their family and don’t have time to exercise.  The high poverty rate and the fact that healthy food is more expensive than McDonalds make access to good eating habits even more difficult.   Even if they did have time, the streets are too dangerous to go running.  Most of these people don’t have their own cars in order to get to a gym and there is very poor public transportation around the city. 

                There is a rampant spread of STDs throughout Detroit as well.  The most common currently are Gonorrhea and Chlamydia.  There was an average of 6,000 and 15,000 cases of these diseases in Detroit over the past three years.  This is in part due to a lack of sex education from either the parents or from the schools.  The high rate of dropouts and poverty result in much of this and single mothers who need to work two jobs and the problems persist in each generation.

                The last health trend prevalent in Detroit is an outbreak in bed bugs.  This has been a serious problem in Detroit and I have even seen some of it in my own home.  We had a friend come and live with us for a few months who had lived in downtown Detroit for all their life.  We soon after had bed bugs in some of our beds.  The insects are extremely resilient and develop immunities to some insecticides.  It took months of spraying and being vigilant against the bugs to eradicate them.  This is another obvious result of poverty and lack of overall cleanliness of the city which is a main theme throughout all the issues in health faced in Detroit.