Challenge
Globally, more than a billion people reside in urban slums. Residence in slums is a risk factor for a variety of adverse health outcomes. Diseases of slum residents that are eventually recognized by the formal health sector are often those that are complications or sequelae of preventable illnesses.
As such, slum dwellers are likely to live longer with disability (years lived with disability or YLD) or likely to have more years of life lost (YLL) than non-slum residents when they develop the same disease or injuries. In many nations, slum residents are not officially recognized (no work permit, no home address, no identification card, and in some places, no birth or death certificates) and hence the allocated resources do not take into consideration the cost to take care of this population.
New metrics specific to slums need to be developed and used to assess the impact of interventions on disease/injury-related morbidity and mortality, as well as to allocate more realistic resource needs. Health inequity in the world’s burgeoning slums is the product of numerous complex social, physical, economic, and political factors. The search for solutions requires better data on the burden of disease morbidity and an integrative understanding of determining factors, matched by creative multidisciplinary insights, tools and methodologies to design interventions.
A multidisciplinary group of faculty and students associated with UC Berkeley’s Center for Global Public Health is defining a new, forward-looking research agenda on slum health.
