"Unnatural Causes" on PBS -- Must See Television

Your local PBS station starting Thursday night and running for the next four weeks will air one of the most significant documentaries on health-related issues to come along in a long time. It's called "Unnatural Causes," and was produced by California Newsreel. Here's the blurb from their website:

UNNATURAL CAUSES sounds the alarm about the extent of our alarming socio-economic and racial inequities in health—and searches for their root causes. But those causes are not what we might expect. While we pour more and more money into drugs, dietary supplements and new medical technologies, UNNATURAL CAUSES crisscrosses the country investigating the findings that are shaking up conventional understanding of what really makes us healthy—or sick.

This is a story that implicates us all. We’re spending $2 trillion a year and rising on health care, more than twice per person than the average industrialized nation. Yet American life expectancy ranks 29th in the world, behind Jordan. Infant mortality? Cypress, Slovenia and Malta do better. One third of Americans are obese. Chronic illness now costs American businesses more than $1 trillion a year in lost productivity.

It turns out there’s much more to our health than bad habits, health care or unlucky genes. The social conditions in which we are born, live and work profoundly affect our well-being and longevity.

The four-hour series will be broadcast by PBS beginning March 27, 2008. It has been conceived as part of an ambitious communications and public engagement campaign conducted with leading public health, policy and community-based organizations. The campaign aims to use the series and companion materials to help reframe the national debate over health. It will suggest a new and hopeful approach to tackling health inequities, one that links our individual aspirations for better health not only to medical interventions but to social and economic justice.