You and Your Health - Reflection Report

Hong Kong Baptist University

College of international Education

Reflective Report

After reading the article “Pollution, Poverty and People of Color: Children at Risk”, I realize that people living in the third world really need help. Pollution is all over on their school, home, playground and the place they are living on.

In the beginning, the writer Lindsey Konkel talk about a 2 years old kid had diagnose for lead poisoning. His mother Wanda Ford did took steps to make sure their 100 years old home was lead free, but they never thought about the pollution of lead has been deep in the soil, and her son played in the backyard all the time. As they are from poorer neighborhood, some pollutant such as factory, vehicle and contaminant are right next to their home. These make the body of people in poverty accumulate more and more heavy metals, and finally become lead poison.

Also, scientists found that there are some synergistic effects between stress and pollution. A suitable stress in our life can improve our performance, but stress in poverty population would affect their health seriously. People with poverty are facing financial straining, racial issues and high crime rates. I cannot imagine how terrible stress I am going to face. With such poor living condition, people will have chronic stress. Chronic stress can wear down the systems responsible for controlling immunity and hormones. That mean their immunization will be lower, and pollutants are much more easier to get entry into the blood. Besides that, lower the hormone levels will affect the proper brain development. This is a serious issue that the local government should deal with first.

Fortunately, a scientist team of Columbia University in New York showed that the possibility to reverse cognitive effects of lead poisoning. They got some lead-poisoned rats and these rats had cognitive deficits. Scientists removed them from the solitary laboratory cages and housed in groups of eight in...