A toddler came into my examination room recently at Bayview Child Health Center in Bayview Hunters Point, an underserved, largely African-American neighborhood in San Francisco. Her mother was worried that she wasn’t growing properly, and she was right: At the age of 2½, her daughter ranked at the very bottom of the height and weight charts that pediatricians use to gauge whether kids are growing normally. My patient’s mom had tried everything she could to help her daughter eat right and gain weight but nothing seemed to be working. It appeared to be a classic case of what doctors call “failure to thrive."
Lots of children “fail to thrive,” for one reason or another, with higher rates occurring in economically disadvantaged areas. Decades of research have linked race and income to health disparities: If you are poor and African-American or Latino, the statistics show that you are more likely to have asthma or obesity as a child, and get a heart attack or die of cancer as an adult.
[For more of this story, written by Nadine Burke Harris, go to http://www.politico.com/agenda...-in-childhood-000297]
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