Impact of environmental inequity on health outcome : Where is the epidemiological evidence?

A significant amount of evidence reveals a presence of environmental inequity. Although there is a disproportionate distribution of waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities, and chemical and manufacturing plants in minority and low-income communities in the United States, little research has...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of the National Medical Association Vol. 92; no. 6; pp. 275 - 280
Main Authors RENE, A. A, DANIELS, D. E, MARTIN, S. A
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Thorofare, NJ Slack 01.06.2000
Elsevier Limited
National Medical Association
Subjects
Analysis. Health state
Biological and medical sciences
Causality
Environmental Monitoring
Environmental Pollution
Epidemiologic Methods
Epidemiological Monitoring
Epidemiology
General aspects
Health Status
Humans
Medical sciences
Minority Groups
Poverty
Public health. Hygiene
Public health. Hygiene-occupational medicine
United States
United States
North America
America
Human
Health and environment
Socioeconomic status
Sociodemographic factor
Health
Sanitary surveillance
Epidemiology
Public health
Inequality
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Summary:A significant amount of evidence reveals a presence of environmental inequity. Although there is a disproportionate distribution of waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities, and chemical and manufacturing plants in minority and low-income communities in the United States, little research has been devoted to show any associations based on analytic epidemiological methods. To date, attempts to quantify health disparities have included demographic data, race, sex, income, other socioeconomic factors, and broad symptomatic survey instruments. To study this, we examined the latest epidemiological evidence documenting the existence of adverse health impacts resulting from environmental inequity. We observed that the overwhelming majority of studies were descriptive in nature and lacked comparison populations. As a result, we believe that further research based on analytic epidemiological methods would further contribute to the determination of the cause-effect relationship between environmental exposure and health outcome.
ISSN:0027-9684
1943-4693