03/28

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28
Mar 14

Statistics Make My Head Hurt

I kind of liked the contrast in today’s reading as opposed to the gentrification we talked about last week. In the case of gentrification, it can be perceived that there isn’t any initial intent to do harm but in this reading it seems to be the exact opposite. To reduce the amount of fire departments available in an area more prone to fires, if not intentionally harmful, might be one of the dumbest ideas in New York City policy. One of…

Also reducing these services to force people to relocate somehow correlating through the magic of statistics to poor HIV/AIDS prevention and control literally takes away any fighting chance these people have to survive and it’s awful. You can either die in a fire in a poor neighborhood or you can gamble with a disease that will surely lead to your death.

Although I don’t understand it entirely, I find it very interesting and worthy of further investigation to examine how all these seemingly unrelated factors overlap on each other and connect.

 

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28
Mar 14

Planned Shrinkage

After reading the paper for this week, it doesn’t seem to make sense why the city would reduce fire-control in areas that would statistically have more fires. Normally, these weird instances of pulling plugs and cutting support from people who need them is a matter of saving money. But here, cutting off the amount of fire departments available to control fires is a matter of life and death in some cases. However, once we establish that this is a “planned shrinkage,” and that the effects of reducing services in low-income areas was intentional, we see that the reason was in indeed disperse low-income populations.

Referring to Cameron’s flow-chart, I wonder if getting rid of AIDS dense areas was part of the plan as well or if it was just a consequence of dispersing low-income areas. Either way, the problem worsened and the spread of AIDS became harder to control.

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28
Mar 14

Intricate connections

I really enjoyed this paper (except for the statistics, which I honestly did not even try to understand). I found its conclusions to be more complex than usual because they involved many factor, and therefore more realistic and interesting. Don’t get me wrong–it was disheartening as hell. But at least the phenomena Wallace is describing are complicated & multifaceted enough to reflect reality. There are one main causal chains that I picked out of the reading:

overcrowding + (evil) reduction in fire service => population dispersal/relocation => dispersal of intravenous drug using population (population with highest HIV/AIDS rates and transmission potential) => more widespread HIV/AIDS => more difficulty in creating effective HIV/AIDS prevention programs

This, to me, is the point of public health as a social science. We can pretty much guess that such important factors like housing quality & availability will have an effect on people’s physical health, but articles like this explain what exactly the effect is and clearly illustrate its cause-and-effect relationships. That said, I think the ideas Wallace presented here were somewhat limited by the “paper” format because all the interconnected ideas had to be split up on different pages. The timeline, specifically, could have been laid out more clearly (I think) even in the paper format. Y’all will hear more about that later this morning.

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