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Open Access 01-05-2007

Urban Poverty: An Urgent Public Health Issue

Authors: Susan Mercado, Kirsten Havemann, Mojgan Sami, Hiroshi Ueda

Published in: Journal of Urban Health | Special Issue 1/2007

Excerpt

The World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) has posed a provocative question for public health: “Why do we keep treating people for illnesses only to send them back to the conditions that created illness in the first place?”1 For the WHO Centre for Health Development (WHO Kobe Centre), hub of the Commission’s Knowledge Network on Urban Settings (KNUS), this represents a challenge to the public health sector not only to acknowledge the pervasiveness of urban poverty as a critical pathway to ill health and health inequities, but to address this as an urgent public health issue affecting a billion people living in informal settlements, or “slums.”¹ …

UN-HABITAT defines “slum” as: “A heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor”.2

These numbers are based on country reports from UN-HABITAT in 2001, which were subsequently organized as WHO regional statistics.

Former WHO Director-General Dr. J. W. Lee stated at the launch of the WHO Commission for Social Determinants of Health that social determinants of health are the conditions in which people live and work. They are the “causes behind the causes” of ill health. (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=21561 accessed 21 February 2007).

These papers have been abridged and are presented in this special supplement of the Journal of Urban Health.

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Title: Urban Poverty: An Urgent Public Health Issue
Authors: Susan Mercado
Kirsten Havemann
Mojgan Sami
Hiroshi Ueda
Publication date: 01-05-2007
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Urban Health / Issue Special Issue 1/2007
Print ISSN: 1099-3460
Electronic ISSN: 1468-2869
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-007-9191-5

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Other articles of this Special Issue 1/2007

Income and Health in Cities: the Messages from Stylized Facts

Climate Change and Developing-Country Cities: Implications For Environmental Health and Equity

The Design of Housing and Shelter Programs: The Social and Environmental Determinants of Inequalities

Improving Health and Building Human Capital Through an Effective Primary Care System

Integrated Approaches to Address the Social Determinants of Health for Reducing Health Inequity

Urbanization and Slum Formation