Unnatural Causes

Season

2008

8.2

"Why do some of us get sicker more often and die sooner, and what causes us to become sick in the first place? This limited series explores the apparent link between a person's health and his social, economic and physical environments, which can affect one's health and longevity as strongly as such other better-known factors as smoking, diet and exercise."

Episode List

S1 • E1

In Sickness and in Wealth

What are the connections between healthy bodies and healthy bank accounts and skin color? How do social policies and the way we organize work and society affect health? Solutions lie not in more pills but in more equality.

S1 • E2

When the Bough Breaks

Infant mortality rates among African Americans remain twice as high as among whites. African American women with graduate degrees still face a greater risk of delivering pre-term, low birth-weight babies than white women who didn't finish high school. In this medical detective story, researchers are circling in on the added burden of racism through the life-course as a long-term risk factor.

S1 • E3

Becoming American

Recent Mexican immigrants, though generally poorer, tend to be healthier than the average American. But the longer they're here, the worse their relative health becomes. This is known as the "Hispanic Paradox." Is there something about life in America that is harmful to health? Conversely, what is protective about new immigrant communities that we can all learn from? Can community and labor organizing reverse the downward trend?

S1 • E4

Bad Sugar

The O'odham Indian reservations of southern Arizona are marked with the dubious distinction of perhaps the highest rates of Type 2 diabetes in the world. Exploring a re-conceptualization of chronic disease as the body's response to "futurelessness" a condition arising from decades of oppression and historical trauma we look at the prospects for a new approach that places a community taking control of its own destiny as fundamental to regaining health.

S1 • E5

Place Matters

Patterns of uneven development mark the Pacific islands and diabetes, cardiovascular and kidney diseases, even tuberculosis, are taking a growing toll on Pacific Islander populations. In the Marshall Islands and in the unlikely spot of Springdale, AR we witness how US occupation, military policy and globalization impact people's health-often in unanticipated ways.

S1 • E6

Collateral Damage

S1 • E7

Not Just a Paycheck

How does employment policy and job insecurity affect our health? Residents of western Michigan struggle against depression, domestic violence and an up-tick in heart disease and diabetes when the largest refrigerator factory in the country shuts down. Ironically, the plant is owned by a Swedish company, where shutdowns, far from devastating lives, are relatively benign events for some even an opportunity because of Swedish government policies rooted in an ethos of shared responsibility.