Mary Turner (far right) speaks during a Louisville screening and town hall meeting about the PBS four-part documentary series "Unnatural Causes." Jim Taylor and Tondra Young are at her right.

Is inequality making us sick?
Matthew Ralph

Jim Taylor, Tondra Young and Corey Anderson all work in the same fast-paced and stress-filled environment of an urban medical center yet when it comes to their own personal health and life expectancy they are on a vastly different continuum.

According to statistics presented in a new PBS documentary series “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick,” Taylor is expected to live three years longer than Young and six years longer than Anderson simply because of the neighborhood he lives in, the professional title after his name and the number of zeros on his pay stub that go with the responsibilities of a high profile job.

Taylor, a CEO of a large hospital; Young, a medical technician; and Anderson, a hospital janitor, are representative of an alarming health trend in the U.S. that makes it possible to predict life expectancy and health risk based on neighborhood, income level and the social factors of race, education, environmental degradation and access to fresh food options that go with status and wealth.

Taylor, Young and Anderson are featured along with Mary Turner, an unemployed mother of three living from one government support check to the next, in “In Sickness and In Wealth,” the first of the four-part PBS documentary series that debuts March 27.

The first 28 minutes of the film were screened last week in Louisvile, Ky., where the four characters live, each in different parts of the 700,000-person city that illustrate the blatant discrepancy between the haves, the have-nots and the somewhere in betweens.

As the Bronx-raised Adewale Troutman, MD, pointed out in the film and in a public town hall meeting about the series at the Kentucky Center for the Arts, the issues presented are a wake-up call to the nation.

“We have to change how we look at health,” said Troutman, who is the director of Louisville’s public health department. Early in the film, he’s shown asking a youth at an inner-city school whether he has a back-up plan if he doesn’t make the NBA. To address the issue in his community, Troutman spearheaded the opening of the Center for Health Equality in his department in 2006.

Two of the filmmakers, Llewellyn M. Smith and Christine Herbes-Sommers, also participated in the dialogue.

“It comes back to power and how you get to the sources of power to make a change,” Smith said.

Turner, who is shown in the film pushing her cart through a Sav-A-Lot grocery store and explaining the economics of choosing a frozen pizza for $1.99 to feed her family over a more healthy option for double the price, told the audience that the film captured a story she knows all too well.

“I live it, my friends live it and my neighborhood lives it,” said Turner, who lives in an area of town registering the kinds of statistics that breed hopelessness. “I’m not sure what can be done.”

Juxtaposed to the scenes of Taylor, the CEO of University of Louisville Hospital, in his well-kept property on the eastern suburbs and walking his dogs in a lush green park, Turner’s story is even more heart-breaking.

“I don’t take it personally,” Taylor said of the portrayal of his life of privelege in the film. “I take it as a way to bring an important issue to life.”

This story, of course, is nothing new. Social justice leaders like Ron Sider--who authored “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger” in the ‘70s)--have been pointing out this widening gap between rich and poor for years. The crisis of access for the poor to quality housing, education and health care coupled with the constant threat of drug abuse, crime, alcoholism and poor eating habits is chronicled in the police blotter of every daily newspaper.

What “Unnatural Causes” does is bring it all together, attaching a bullhorn call to action in an optimistic package Smith alluded to in his remarks to the 500-plus people in attendance at the Louisville town hall meeting representing everyone from corporate executives and religious leaders to idealistic college students and welfare moms.

“This is not an impossible challenge,” Smith said.

“Unnatural Causes” will air every Thursday for four weeks on PBS beginning March 27. For more information, visit www.unnaturalcauses.org.

posted [03.26.08]

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