Tariq Nelson

- Malnutrition is cheating Africa and its survivors (hat tip to Steve)

Robbed of vital nutrients as children, they grow up stunted and sickly, weaklings in a land that still runs on manual labor. Some become intellectually stunted adults, shorn of as many as 15 I.Q. points, unable to learn or even to concentrate, inclined to drop out of school early.

Anyone still want to tell me things like this are “of no benefit?” If children are affected on with large deficiencies, do you think a child may also be affected to a lesser extent as well even here in the US?

- You may be able to grow new teeth with stem cell research

- Brain Gain: Mental Exercise Makes Elderly Minds More Fit

- How much does a change of environment Affect the Poor?

When the program was launched, housing vouchers were seen as a promising antidote to urban poverty. Researchers had pinpointed ghettos as a culprit in the worsening fortunes of many poor, minority families. Free them from the poisonous cocktail of drugs and crime brewing in city ghettos, scholars reasoned, and the families would have a chance to leave poverty behind.

But results show that may only partially be true. “It would have been wonderful to have discovered the magic bullet,” says Jeffrey Liebman, a Harvard economist who has studied the program.

Findings, he says, were more complicated. Among them: boys whose families moved actually fared worse than boys who stayed in bad neighborhoods. Girls, however, fared significantly better. Adults felt better, physically and mentally, than those who stayed behind, but didn’t do better financially

[...]

Over time, researchers followed the families who moved, comparing them with those who stayed. The fortunes of the families involved were surprising: Earnings of families who relocated to low-poverty areas averaged just $9,376 in 2001, a half-decade after they moved. That’s just 3% higher than the $9,108 earned by those in the control group, a statistically insignificant difference.

Other measures improved. In a 2002 survey of 3,521 adults in the program—most of them women—18.5% of people who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods suffered bouts of major depression, significantly lower than the 26.3% who felt depressed in the control group. Mr. Liebman, the Harvard economist, says that’s roughly the same effect that’s seen when depressed people are put on a regimen of antidepressant drugs.

Among nearly 800 teenage girls, 83% of those who relocated to low-poverty neighborhoods had either graduated from high school or were still in school five years after the move, compared with 71% in the control group. Alcohol use was lower. Arrest rates were lower. And mental-health measures improved. Away from the violence of the ghetto, girls seemed to flourish.

Teenage boys didn’t. School participation deteriorated and property-crime rates, mental distress, and smoking all increased among those who moved with the vouchers, compared with teenage boys in families who didn’t move. For property crime, there were 58 arrests for every 100 boys who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods, compared with 22 arrests for every 100 boys in the control group.

Because boys hang out more in their neighborhoods, researchers expected they would respond well to safer, more-affluent environments. Instead, many seemed to feel isolated in the new places, or harassed by police, and they acted out.