A report released by National Center on Family Homelessness finds
that one in 45 US children (1.6 million) are homeless, the majority
under the age of seven. The Christian Science Monitor reports,
“The number of homeless children in 2010 exceeded even the total in
2006, when thousands of families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and
Rita produced a historic spike in homelessness.”
It doesn’t stop there. According to recent figures
released by the USDA, 17.2 million American households (14.5 percent)
are "food insecure,” one of the highest recorded rates since surveys
were first conducted in 1995. As a result, 16.2 million American
children – one in five-- face the threat of hunger. According to
emergency room doctors in cities around the country, this is leading to a
dramatic spike in malnourishment in babies.
Over the summer, the Boston Globe reported
on shocking levels of infant malnourishment in Massachusetts. Doctors
at the Boston Medical Center (BMC) reported seeing “more hungry and
dangerously thin young children in the emergency room than at any time
in more than a decade of surveying families.” Pediatricians in other
large cities, including Baltimore, Little Rock, Minneapolis, and
Philadelphia, have also seen a rise in infant and child malnourishment
since 2008.
BMC doctors also warn that “rising chronic hunger threatens to leave
scores of infants and toddlers with lasting learning and developmental
problems.”
The Globe likened child malnourishment and hunger among Boston’s poor to levels seen in the "developing world."
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