What's the mystery? Poor people, especially the urban poor, tend to malnourished. Malnourished people are more vulnerable to disease. Sick people die younger than healthy. Foraging in the historical record seems to me to be partly a way of avoiding having to face the impact on health of inequality and poverty in modern society. You don't even need go to a Third World country to do this; take South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the poorest county in the US, with an average family income of $3,700 per year. Life expectancy there for men is 48; for women 52. <http://www.lakotamall.com/allies/pineridgefacts.htm> Is Kolata likely to devote an article to do this? Of course not, because she would have to acknowledge issues of class and race, and that doesn't befit a corporate shill like her.
From SourceWatch:
[...] In a July 1999 article for The Nation environmental journalist Mark Dowie sampled 100 of the more than 600 articles Kolata had written since she started at the New York Times. "When it comes to developing sources, procuring documents, researching complex data and breaking a hot story in clear and dynamic prose, she has few peers," he wrote. [11] (http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Gina-Kolata-Dowie6jul98.htm) What puzzled Dowie was "why are so many of her associates at the paper, including her admiring colleague, so upset with her? And why is she held in such low esteem by so many scientists?" While describing her coverage of pure science as "terrific" and her reporting of mathematics similarly "with one exception", he found fault with her environmental reporting. In an interview Dowie described her reporting on broad environmental topics as being characterised by "a hard, pro-technology, pro-corporate line on products or issues that are very controversial: silicone breast implants, irradiated food, experimental AIDS drugs, and breast cancer. In fact, Gina took a strong position that breast cancer has no environmental etiology at all, and took every opportunity to make that point even as her sister, Judy, was struggling with breast cancer. Gina reviewed "Rachel's Daughters," a film made on breast cancer, and strongly criticized the film's inquiry of environmental causes." [12] (http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Mark-Dowie-Wild-DuckApr99.htm) [...] full: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gina_Kolata -- Colin Brace Amsterdam
