This is a video about hunger and poverty in the USA.
By Kate Randall:
Child hunger in US rose by 50 percent in 2007
20 November 2008
Some 691,000 children went hungry in America in 2007, a rise of 50 percent over the previous year, while one in eight Americans overall struggled to feed themselves. The figures are reported in a study on food security conducted annually by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Of the 36.2 million people who struggled with hunger during the year, almost a third of these adults and children faced a substantial disruption to their food supply, meaning they went hungry at some point. The number of these most hungry Americans has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000, rising to 11.9 million individuals in 2007.
These statistics are all the more alarming since they do not reflect the impact of the current economic crisis. James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, predicted the 2008 numbers would show even more hunger.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has issued a formal recommendation that its members begin screening all their patients—in effect, every child in America—for food insecurity. The extraordinary action, the first of its kind for the medical group, testifies to the spread of hunger and destitution throughout the United States: here.
Related articles
- It’s a New Year…What’s your Social Justice Resolution/Revolution? by Marie Cartier (feminismandreligion.com)
- Ending hunger in the U.S.: The first step (stltoday.com)
- Ohio can lead the fight against senior hunger (toledoblade.com)
- Hunger Is Rising Across U.S., Say City Leaders (nation.time.com)
- Yoko Ono recounts own hunger during war in Japan (bostonherald.com)
- SHAME: Millions of Americans Are Going Hungry and Republicans Plan to Make Even Worse (politicususa.com)
- And A Little Child Shall Lead Them (cindybiondigobrecht.wordpress.com)
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Poverty may reduce kids’ brain function
Dec. 6, 2008
Courtesy University of California, Berkeley
and World Science staff
In alarming research results that they describe as a “wake-up call,” psychologists have found poorer children tend to suffer from reduced brain activity.
“The stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status” may be responsible, said psychologist Robert Knight of University of California, Berkeley, one of the researchers. “Fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.”
Knight suspects proper training can eliminate the differences. His group is working with neuroscientists who use games to improve children’s reasoning ability.
As it stands, “kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe [part of the brain] as an adult,” Knight continued. “We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response.”
In a study accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Knight and colleagues found that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain critical for problem solving and creativity.
Brain function was measured by means of an electroencephalograph, a cap fitted with electrodes to measure electrical activity in the brain like that used to assess epilepsy, sleep disorders and brain tumors.
Although previous research had also suggested poorer children suffer from less brain stimulation, past studies used “only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors,” said the university’s Mark Kishiyama, a member of the research team. “Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity.”
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081206_brain
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