There was recently a study published by Harvard that explored the heights of women in developing countries. This was important to their study of the conditions that these women were living in, as height as an adult is often linked to levels of childhood nutrition, poverty, and disease.As such, it can be used to track the conditions of women in these countries. It found that in 14 African countries, the heights of women have decreased over the past two decades. Additionally, heights have remained the same in 21 countries in both Africa and South America. What this suggested to researchers is that women in these countries were actually worse off and being raised in poorer conditions than their mothers and grandmothers had been.
One Harvard professor involved in the study went as far as saying that the results showed that conditions for women in lower socioeconomic classes are getting worse. This underlies again what we talked about in class regarding the ties between poverty and health. According to the study, these women lacked the economic ability to have proper nutrition at a young age, and as a result of this suffered from lowered height then previous generations. While a little height in and of itself could be seen as benign, the bigger problem is what this says about the health of these women in other areas.
The study covered 54 countries considered "poor to middle class" and looked at the heights of over 365,000 women. Only those between the ages of 25 and 49 were looked at, so that women still growing or women who had started shrinking wouldn't interfere with the data.
One thing that I wish the study had done is examine data from women in countries considered developed as well, so that there would be a basis for saying that women in poor countries deviated strongly from those in other areas. Without this comparison, I don't think that you can cite it as purely an indication of poverty in these countries.
This article was found on the New York Times website
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ReplyDeleteI agree that a control is necessary here as mentioned but I think that this is also an interesting example of how public health sometimes manipulates data or finds "work arounds" in order to get the data they need. So much of public health is time-dependent, and measuring height is much easier and requires very little technical equipment as compared to measuring a somewhat intangible quality like nutrition levels or something more technology dependent like blood level readings. Height is easy to measure, has universal standards of measurement, and requires very little actual tools in order to measure. Again though, I would like to see this data plotted on a timewise scale with high and mid range countries included as well.
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