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Problems with the Poverty Threshold

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Problems with the Poverty Threshold
When I think of the term “poverty threshold”, I imagine some kind of physical barrier that is holding poor people back from living a normal life. These people fall under the poverty level and struggle for quite some time, like a fish out of water just hoping for someone to throw them back in so that they could possibly live a normal life. When looking at the gross yearly income that determines the poverty level, which is at about $31,800 for a four-person family (as of 2006), I think to myself ‘How can all of these people be living in such low standards?’ Well obviously they do not have a choice! I mean most of the people in poverty live in dirty places that are screaming with disease and they …show more content…

A common, threatening event in women who are bearing children and are undernourished is the result of premature birth, which creates yet another problem among the impoverished. According to Tanner and Finn-Stevenson, premature babies are highly vulnerable to health complications because they are unable to perform biological functions such as breathing and sucking independently (2002). Also they found that premature infants process information at a slower rate and have a lower intelligence level as well as having more learning problems in school than full-term infants (Tanner and Finn-Stevenson, 2002). In one study done by Chavez, Martinez, and Yaschine in 1975 of Mexican infants in poverty, out of two groups of newborns, one group was supplemented with powdered milk, vitamins, and minerals, while the diet of the other group consisted of prolonged breastfeeding (Tanner and Finn-Stevenson, 2002). In that particular community breastfeeding was resulting in malnutrition of the infants receiving the breast milk due to the poor diets that their mothers were ingesting. The results of this test showed that after eighteen months the mothers of the supplemented infants initiated more complex interactions with their offspring than the

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