This article discusses the evidence supporting the link between childhood and adolescent SES and adult health, and explores different environmental, behavioral, and physiological pathways that might explain how early SES would influence adult health.  THe authors also address the ages when SES exposures matter most for setting adult health trajectories as well as the role of exposure duration in SES influences on later health. While early childhood exposures seem to be potent predictors of a range of health outcomes, the authors emphasize that later childhood and adolescent exposures are risks for other health outcomes.

This report finds that across metropolitan America, black and Hispanic children face particularly severe challenges. Inequalities go far beyond what can be explained by income differences, as poor black and Hispanic children tend to encounter environments considerably worse than poor white and Asian children. Yet the very conditions that contribute to these inequalities suggest some possible policy solutions.

The analysis contained in this report is derived from diversitydata.org, a website using data from multiple sources to profile U.S. metropolitan areas's indicators on many dimensions of well-being, including housing, neighborhood conditions, residential integration, education and health.

In the United States, Black infants have significantly worse birth outcomes than White infants.  Over the past decades, public health efforts to address these disparities have focused primarily on increasing access to prenatal care, however, this has not led to closing the gap in birth outcomes.  This article proposes a 12-point plan to reduce Black-White disparities in birth outcomes using a life-course approach.

Unhealthy neighborhoods and lack of health care contribute to poor health, and they are unequally distributed. People of color are exposed to greater threats and have less access to quality care. This report outlines causes of inequities as well as promising initiatves around the country to combat them. One chapter focuses on Tohono O'odham Community Action (www.tocaonline.org) an organization co-founded by Terrol Dew Johnson, who appears in the episode "Bad Sugar."

A report published July 8 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that, while outcomes from the four leading cancers overall improved between 1993 and 2001, most of the decline in deaths occurred among men and women with college degrees. Among women with fewer than 12 years of education, only white women showed a signicant decline in mortality from breast cancer.

Research on rhesus monkeys found that subordinant monkeys were more likely than dominant monkeys to overindulge in high-calorie snacks when they were made available, and more likely to "binge" on this food at night. This and other studies with humans provide emperical evidence for what many of us already know from personal experience: we are more likely to eat poorly when we're under stress.

A conversational piece aimed at understanding and intervening on the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the U.S. population. Some questions addressed: Why discuss racism at all when talking about health? What is racism? What is “race”? Is there something about the environment that we can usefully describe as the "racial climate," and if so, how do we measure it and what is it doing? If we want to confront institutionalized racism, what does that really mean and how do we get started?

This paper represents the first phase of a Canadian initiative on intersectoral action for health and provides an overview of approaches to intersectoral action at the global, sub-regional, national, sub-national, and community levels. It is intended to contribute to the World Health Organisation’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health (SDH)

Differential exposure to minority status stressors may help explain differences in United States (US)-born and foreign-born Black women's birth outcomes.  Self-reported prevalence of personal racism and group racism was significantly higher among US-born than foreign-born Black pregnant women, with US-born women having 4.1 and 7.8 times the odds, respectively, of childhood exposure. Differential exposure to self-reported racism over the life course may be a critically important factor that distinguishes US-born Black women from their foreign-born counterparts.

The David and Collins article, cited in When the Bough Breaks, that finds that African-born Black women living in the U.S. had similar delivery outcomes to white American women, while U.S.-born Black women gave birth to babies of significantly lower average birth weight. This relationship still existed when other socioeconomic factors were controlled for.

The authors analyzed Illinois vital records to determine the intergenerational birth weight patterns among the descendants of US-born and foreign-born White and African-American women. Among the descendants of generation 1 European-born White women,  generation 3 females had a birth weight 45 g more than that of their generation 2 mothers . Among the descendants of generation 1 US-born African-American women, generation 3 females had a birth weight 17 g more than that of their generation 2 mothers. Among the descendants of generation 1 African/Caribbean-born women, generation 3 females had a birth weight 57 g less than that of their generation 2 mothers; generation 3 females had a 40% greater moderately low birth weight rate than did their generation 2 mothers: 9.6% percent versus 6.7% percent. Maternal age and marital status did not account for the birth weight trends. The authors conclude that the expected intergenerational rise in birth weight does not occur among the direct female descendants of foreign-born African-American women.

The cause of low birth weights among African-American women has more to do with racism than with race, according to a report by an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Minority women are subject to stress caused by perceived racial discrimination, the researchers said.  They asked the mothers if they had ever been treated unfairly because of their race when looking for a job, in an educational setting or in other situations.  Those who felt discriminated against had a twofold increase in low birth weights. And for those who experienced discrimination in three "domains," the increase was nearly threefold.

Since 1950, dramatic advances in human genetics have occurred, racial disparities in infant mortality have widened, and the United States' international ranking in infant mortality has deteriorated. The quest for a "preterm birth gene" to explain racial differences is now under way. Scores of papers linking polymorphisms to preterm birth have appeared in the past few years. Is this strategy likely to reduce racial disparities? A review of broad epidemiological patterns contradicts the genetic theory of race and points toward social mechanisms.
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Recently, the scope of environmental health science has broadened to encompass how the built environment affects human health. Many groups are focusing research efforts on how inadequate housing in particular contributes to poor health. Low-income and minority populations are known to be especially at risk for housing-related adverse health effects. Yet fully elucidating the links between the built environment and health disparities is a huge task, one that is requiring new tools and research methods. Community groups are increasingly being brought into the research loop to ensure that efforts to identify and reduce health problems are appropriately targeted.

Researchers at UC San Francisco say they have found the first direct evidence that severe and chronic emotional stress can age people biologically.

Well established evidence illustrates that opportunities provided to young children are crucial in shaping lifelong health  and development status.

This is an interim report, submitted by the Early Child Development Knowledge Network to develop the Commission's final report in May 2008.

Beginning with evidence that unemployment is bad for health and that welfare to work (when the work is low-paid and demeaning) does little to help, this editorial recommends further government support for higher education and quality apprenticeship-style positions.

 Education can influence health in many ways. This issue brief examines three major interrelated pathways through which educational attainment is linked with health: health knowledge and behaviors; employment and income; and social and psychological factors, including sense of control, social standing and social support. In addition, this brief explores how educational attainment affects health across generations, examining the links between parents’ education—and the social and economic advantages it represents—and their children’s health and social advantages, including opportunities for educational attainment.

The much lower prevalence of type 2 diabetes and obesity in the Pima Indians in Mexico than in the U.S. indicates that even in populations that may be genetically prone to these conditions, their development is determined mostly by environmental circumstances, thereby suggesting that type 2 diabetes is largely preventable. This study provides compelling evidence that changes in lifestyle associated with Westernization play a major role in the global epidemic of type 2 diabetes.

The report helps to develop measures to clarify how different types of jobs, threat of unemployment affect workers’ health. 

This is an interim report, submitted by the Employment Conditions Knowledge Network to develop the Commission's final report in May 2008.

A newspaper article that looks at the epidemic of premature "aging" and death in the poor. Epstein explores the question, "Is there something deadly in the American experience of urban poverty itself?"

Equitable development is an approach to creating healthy, vibrant, communities of opportunity. Equitable outcomes come about when smart, intentional strategies are put in place to ensure that low-income communities and communities of color participate in and benefit from decisions that shape their neighborhoods and regions. This online toolkit includes 28 tools to reverse patterns of segregation and disinvestment, prevent displacement, and promote equitable revitalization.

Despite the Canadian record of concern with the social determinants of health (SDOH), actual public health activities consistent with such an approach are sporadic at best. Canadian research and advocacy activities in the service of strengthening the SDOH are so divorced from everyday public policy activity, media discourse and public awareness as to metaphorically suggest that SDOH researchers and advocates exist in a Phantom Zone of irrelevance.

Why this might be the case and means of escaping from such irrelevance are presented. Implications for jurisdictions where the situation appears to be even worse—such as the USA—and for those where the situation may be somewhat better are also presented.