This resource shows that income and health go hand in hand. People live longer in richer countries. Countries are richer where people live longer. There are no high-income countries with a short life expectancy and no low-income countries with a long life expectancy. Still, there’s a huge difference in life expectancy between countries on the same income level, depending on how the money is distributed and how it is used.
In this TedTalk video, Helena Nordenstedt presents the Global Health Framework, which can help you to understand how income is related to health. Basically, low income countries tend to have a lower life expectancy than countries with higher income levels.
She shows that minority groups within countries (in all income levels) generally have a lower life expectancy than the rest of the population, but as the countries get richer and healthier, the health of the minorities also improves.
She also shows that there is no minority group in middle income and high income countries that has a life expectancy lower than the average in poor countries.
Meet Misra Walker, an 18-year-old who lives in a section of the South Bronx in New York City called Hunts Point. Misra explains some of the conditions her community lives with because of significant industrial activity in the area. She tells how she, along with her teen advocacy group, A.C.T.I.O.N., worked to convince the Manhattan Transit Authority (M.T.A.) to run a seasonal bus shuttle to one of the few green spaces in the community.
New York student Shadia Wood tells how she became an environmental activist in this video adapted from Earth Island Institute’s New Leaders Initiative. Wood lives near several toxic waste sites and was concerned to learn that the New York Superfund—the money set aside for cleaning such sites in her state—had gone bankrupt.
