Toronto Star
Mar. 14, 2003
Is it possible that policy is more boring than sex?
JUDY GERSTEL
I am going to write something today that may be against the best interests of
the Toronto Star.
It won't be libellous. It won't advocate insurrection. It won't even be
subversive.
But it might be boring.
Fear of boring readers (especially 18- to 35-year-olds who are lusted after by
the media and Must Be Entertained) may be the reason you likely don't already
know about the Toronto Charter for a Healthy Canada.
The truth is that stories about sex, food, movies, TV, sex, sports, money, sex,
crime, celebrity and sex are much more likely to attract and titillate readers
than stories about ... health policy.
No matter how you look at it - or write about it - health policy is, uh, not
sexy. And I had seriously considered writing
something sexy in this space today.
In fact, I had considered writing about sex itself, about how, after the
not-at-all naughty '90s and the libido-dampening threat of an AIDS epidemic, sex
is again not only au courant but altogether rampant.
You can blame (or thank) the Internet - the best thing to happen to sex since
the `60s and the Pill - for the proliferation of
what New York Magazine calls "unapologetically no-strings-attached, purely
sexual experience."
Observed the January edition of the magazine, "The rise of Internet dating has
brought a sexual openness (not to mention one-night stands) to the younger
generation not seen since the '70s heyday of Maxwell's Plum."
But enough of what I'm not going to write about today.
Having enticed you this far, and at the risk of being accused of bait and
switch, I'm changing the channel back to the Toronto Charter for a Healthy
Canada.
Those of you of any age who are shallow, superficial and Must Be Entertained,
you may want to flip to the Movie section
right now.
The rest of you may be interested to know that what ails us is not what we
think it is and that health is too important to be left to doctors.
The Toronto Charter for a Healthy Canada grew out of a conference at York
University in December.
More than 400 Canadian social and health policy experts, researchers and
community representatives met to talk about the social determinants of health
and how they could and should guide health policy
? even though, for the most,
they don't.
The charter was endorsed this month by the Toronto Board of Health.
But nothing about the Toronto Charter for a Healthy Canada was reported in any
Toronto newspaper, according to a Star library search.
Little wonder that few of us realize that 75 per cent of our health is
determined by the physical, social and economic
environment.
It's a fact that being poor makes you sick. So does being poorly educated.
There's a direct correlation between literacy and health.
Work security, working conditions and social status also can make you sick.
A famous study linking socioeconomic status and health looked at civil servants
in Britain.
Even though they were all white-collar workers, all had the same employer, the
same access to medical care and none was impoverished, the rate of premature
mortality and poor health increased as the civil service grade of the employee
decreased. The higher ranked they were, the healthier they were.
The lowest occupation grades were shown to have four times the mortality risks
of the top grade.
Researchers quickly came to understand that the amount of control on the job,
prestige, income and wealth are all matters of life and death.
We like to blame bad health on poor eating habits and sloth, but we fail to
look at what gives rise to them, the depression and hopelessness rooted in
social exclusion, job insecurity, anxiety about putting food on the table
(affecting one out of 10 Canadian households).
Two of the most important social determinants of health targeted by the Toronto
Charter are affordable, safe housing and a universal system of high quality
educational childcare.
Safeguarding the health of children is the very least a country like Canada can
do.
I apologize if all this is boring, but I'm not finished yet.
I'm going to list the 10 social and economic determinants of health deemed
important by the Toronto Charter for a Healthy Canada. And I'm going to provide
the address of the Web site where you can find out more about the Charter, the
conference, and the people who are determined to make this country healthier:
http://www.socialjustice.org/conference/program.htm.
The 10 social determinants of health (any one of which is considerably more
important than how soon you can get to see a specialist):
1. Early childhood development.
2. Education.
3. Employment and working conditions.
4. Food security.
5. Health care services (with an emphasis on prevention, chronic disease
management and rehabilitation).
6. Housing shortages.
7. Income and its equitable distribution.
8. Social exclusion.
9. Social safety nets.
10. Unemployment.
Now, if you like, flip to the Movies section and Be Entertained. And if you're
lucky, I just might write about sex in this space sometime soon.
[log in to unmask]
|
