Thanks to the work of Children’s Health Fund and its mobile health clinics, many survivors of Hurricane Katrina have had access to doctors and psychologists that they otherwise would never have seen. However, a recent study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University has found that this commendable effort has not been able to provide nearly as much help as is necessary to keep child survivors physically and mentally healthy.
Tens of thousands of children and teenagers lost everything to Hurricane Katrina, and now, three years later, the symptoms of this loss and the underlying problems it has caused are coming to a head. Child survivors are falling behind at school, acting out and have disproportionately high rates of physical and mental illness, and their parents are doing little better, as they too suffer from depression and anxiety, as they struggle to scrape together a living.
Upon reviewing the charts of children treated by the Children’s Health Fund, researchers at the Mailman School found that 41% of children under the age of 4 had iron-deficiency anemia, which is generally caused by poor nutrition and can lead to developmental problems and academic underachievement.
The study also found that 42% of the children who lived in trailers laced with dangerous levels of formaldehyde had allergic rhinitis or an upper respiratory infection. Plus, over half of the children aged 6 to 11 were found to have behavioral or learning problems.
The study concluded that not only has the health of child survivors of Katrina not improved, but it has declined alarmingly. Yet medical care and counseling are nearly impossible to find, and children in the East Baton Rouge School District are waiting as long as two years to receive testing for learning disabilities.
Doctors and educators agree that stability is what these children need most. This theory is backed by the gains of those families that have managed to lay down roots over the past few years and resume a healthy life.
However, it is important to keep in mind that many of the problems doctors are witnessing were not caused by Katrina, but rather exacerbated by the hurricane. Toni Bankston, former director of mental health at the Baton Rouge Children’s Health Project, explains that children who had no serious problems before the storm are likely to recover well. But she estimates that only about 60% of children lacked these sorts of problems before Katrina hit.
If that remaining 40% is left without proper counseling, treatment and guidance, Bankston predicts that the children in question will fall so far behind in school that they will have little to no chance of catching up. “What you’re looking at is our future juvenile justice, our prison population,” she grimly prognosticates.
-Justine Bayod Espoz