Health

Pinka Chatterji and Sara Markowitz find that longer maternity leaves—and fathers who take leave—has positive effects on mothers' health:

.... Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort, we examine measures of depression, overall health status, and substance use. We use a standard OLS as well as an instrumental variables approach with county-level employment conditions and state-level maternity leave policies as identifying instruments. The results suggest that longer maternity leave from work, both paid and un-paid, is associated with declines in depressive symptoms, a reduction in the likelihood of severe depression, and an improvement in overall maternal health. We also find that having a spouse that did not take any paternal leave after childbirth is associated with higher levels of maternal depressive symptoms. We do not find, however, that length of paternal leave is associated with overall maternal health, and we find only mixed evidence that leave length after childbirth affects maternal alcohol use and smoking.

This is a great idea:

Green Carts are mobile food carts that offer fresh produce in certain New York City areas. Local Law 9, signed by Mayor Bloomberg on March 13, 2008, establishes 1,000 permits for Green Carts.

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A total of 500 full-term permits will be available in 2008: 175 permits for Brooklyn, 175 for the Bronx, 75 for Manhattan, 50 for Queens, and 25 for Staten Island. Beginning in July, 2008, these permits will be issued to individuals who have applied to be on the Green Cart waiting lists. In 2009, 500 more Green Cart permits will be available.

A new study finds working overtime is associated with anxiety and depression:

Employees who work overtime are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, according to a study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Working overtime was associated with higher anxiety and depression scores among both men and women, particularly among workers on lower incomes and less-skilled workers, Elisabeth Kleppa from the University of Bergen in Norway found.

Earlier this week, the California Assembly passed legislation requiring employers to provide all workers with a minimum number of paid sick days. According to the official legislative summary, the bill would require employers to provide an hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked. The legislation doesn't exempt small businesses, although employers with ten or fewer employees could limit employees to five days of paid sick leave in a year (larger employers could limit use to nine days). The bill now moves to the California Senate.

Robert Pear reports in today's NYT on new research by Gopal Singh and Mohammad Siahpush showing that growing disparities in life expectancy parallel increases in inequality.

[Singh and Siahpush] developed an index to measure social and economic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors. Counties were then classified into 10 groups of equal population size.

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

It's important to note that this these differences aren't simply between the very poor, in an absolute sense, and the very rich. As the graphs above show, the gap between the rich and the middle appears to be as large, if not larger than the gap between the middle and the bottom.

An earlier version of this research was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2006. In this article, Singh and Siahpush note their analysis of state-level data "indicates that the relationship of income inequality with life expectancy at birth in the US, even after adjusting for differences in absolute income levels, has become steeper over time ...." They conclude:

The widening socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy ... may be related to increasing temporal inequalities in the material and social living conditions between area deprivation groups, both in absolute and relative terms. .... Besides material deprivation, psychosocial characteristics such as stress, low control at work, home, or other life circumstances, social support, and social integration are important are important factors in producing health inequalities....

This, from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, is definitely my favorite crazy conservative editorial on the SCHIP debate:

Sixty-three U.S. House and Senate Republicans last week abandoned conservatism and voted for a major expansion of the nanny state. And others may be about to join the lemmings in jumping over the socialist precipice.

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The new S-CHIP, should GOP "leaders" convince more lemmings to take the plunge and override a promised presidential veto, will have the perverse effect of encouraging those already with private coverage to opt for "the government plan."

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The S-CHIP 63 should be ashamed. As should be Republican "leaders" promising to make the Socialist-CHIP program veto-proof.

Along these lines, have you ever noticed that three of the letters in "SCHIP" are also found in "socialist"? Coincidence? You're just another liberal, err, socialist lemming if you believe that.

Actually, "lemmings jumping over the precipice"¹ strikes me as a pretty good characterization of the conservative echo chamber's behavior in the SCHIP expansion debate. The site of all of them following Michelle Malkin over the precipice has been extremely entertaining.

WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, and The World Bank released a report last week on maternal mortality rates in 171 countries. We didn't fare so well:

The United States ranks 41st in the world for maternal mortality, with one in 4,800 women dying from pregnancy complications, several major international organizations reported yesterday.

The United States was tied with Belarus and just above Serbia and Montenegro. ....

On the bright side, our maternal mortality ranking is better than our international ranking on paid maternity leave.

Over the last decade, economist Janet Currie has done some of the most interesting and important research on health, nutrition and children's programs. One of my favorite papers of hers (co-written with Aaron Yelowitz) found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, public housing projects actually had positive effects on the quality of housing for children and their academic achievement. Currie and Yelowitz start by noting the correlation between living in public housing and negative outcomes, but go on to show that that the correlation is due to unmeasured characteristics of public housing residents. In essence, kids living in public housing would do even worse if they weren't there.

In recent years, Currie has examined the relationship between air pollution and negative child outcomes. In a 2005 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Janet Currie and Matthew Neidell found that carbon monoxide had a significant effect on infant mortality and that reductions in carbon monoxide in the California in the 1990s saved approximately 1,000 infant lives.

In a new working NBER working paper, Currie and colleagues examine the link between school absences in Texas and high levels of carbon monoxide. They conclude that high levels of carbon monoxide (CO) significantly increase absences, even when they are below federal air quality standards.

Thinking about these three papers together, it's worth considering why the presumed badness of public housing for children is a matter of conventional wisdom, while the linkage between air pollution and infant mortality/school attendance is pretty much absent from public consciousness. My guess is that the conventional wisdom on public housing probably has a lot to do with racial stereotyping and prejudice, in much the same way that Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens has found that negative feelings about "welfare" are related to these factors.

Too Much's Sam Pizzigati reports on new research published in the Journal of Public Health that finds a strong association between income inequality and death rates of children under the age of five in wealthy nations:

The four analysts behind the new research, all from Scotland’s University of Dundee, compared 21 nations that sport similar levels of gross income per capita, countries that range from the United States and Japan to Finland and Australia.

Their data reveal, the researchers report in the Journal of Public Health, “a very strong association between income inequality and under-five child mortality.”

The analysts — David Collison, C. R. Dey, Gwen Hannah, and Lorna Stevenson — measured inequality by contrasting, within each rich nation, the share of national income going to the top 20 percent of households to the share going to the bottom 40 percent.

The United States, the data show, has the widest gap between top and bottom and the highest child death rate. Eight children, per thousand live births, die before age five in the United States.

In Japan, the most equal nation in the study, only 4.25 children per thousand die before five.

In Sweden, a nation almost as equal as Japan, only 3.25 children per thousand die before five.

Back in 1960, the authors of the new Journal of Public Health study note, the two rich countries with today’s worst child death stats — the United State and the UK — rated much more favorably in the international child mortality rankings.

The United States ranked 11th on child mortality, out of 24 rich nations, in 1960. The UK ranked eighth. Since then, in both countries, richer households have substantially boosted their share of national income.