Air-Pollution Epidemiology
Question:
Select a confounder or surragate which affects epidemiological studies that you believe does not receive enough attention in politics or the press. Defend your answer in a 3-paged referenced paper.
Given the following assistance:
Definition of epidemiological confounder:
A confounder is an unwanted independent variable that distorts the results of a study.
An example:
Unmeasured population variables like socioeconomic status that varies within a population which may expose people to different levels of air pollution within a community or an environment. This is because:
• The poor suffers many health inequalities.
• The poor does not have assess to good health care because they can not afford health insurance and when they do it is limited.
• The poor often live in more air polluted environment.
• Toxic chemicals are often dumped new poor neighborhood.
• The poor eat and use whatever is available whether polluted or not.
• These and many more will make the results of any air pollutant studied to be distorted because the poor or less privileged would have been exposed more than others to the pollutant due to their activities and living lifestyle or environmental condition.
• I believe socioeconomic status in America does not receive enough political or press coverage because government does not care about increasing minimum wages or about taking good care of the middle class workers. The politicians often do not properly represent their wards in the senate in order to enrich their constituencies -especially the poor neighborhoods. Also employers do not care much about the welfare of their staffs. Factories focus more on profit making and will not take enough measures to protect the people living in the neighborhood. Factories take advantage of the poor people because they can not fight them and win in law courts. The press are not doing enough or not much concerned about socioeconomic factors, but about breaking news, government policies and more popular news making headlines.
Note: Please, let the references (about 6) and the contents be in American context.