For my project, I am planning to map the number of people who are under age 21 who have Asthma in New York. My thesis is that the city with higher concentration of people who have asthma has higher rate of poverty rate than the other cities that don’t have a high concentration of people with asthma. I came up with the idea after reading an article called the “Ghetto Miasma” last semester when I was in Introduction in Healthcare Studies. It says that poor cities and towns tend to have higher rates of asthma, diabetes, and obesity in children because the towns and cities are often dangerous for children to play outside, which leads to obesity. And because houses in those neighborhoods are not environmentally safe, kids develop asthma. (their parents won’t let them play outside because of danger, so more kids will get asthma) Diabetes happen because parents cannot feed their children healthful foods – these neighborhoods only have unhealthful foods such as fast foods and not a lot of healthful alternatives. But since asthma is caused directly by the poor conditions of homes, I decided to narrow the condition list to the number of children (under age 21) who have asthma. (The most recent data)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/magazine/ghetto-miasma-enough-to-make-you-sick.html?pagewanted=all