Miguel Aguirre
Ms. Jaeger
World Geography (Section 4)
November 8, 2011
Slum Effects
A life with no sanitation and where filth is in an everyday meal is not exactly the life anyone wants. Mainly people live in slums because they are forced to, this due to economic problems. A slum is an overpopulated urban area that lives in poverty. Slums negatively affect human population because they are very polluted, overcrowded, and the government does not care about slums to often get diseases and or die.
Primarily, pollution affects the population because it leads to more diseases being spread and more people dying. In the source Fink said, "Slums... are-in a sense- giant cesspools. Sanitation systems are nearly absent. Human waste leaches into the water people drink and contaminates the food they eat. It carries typhoid and other diseases that can be deadly...” The unsanitary level of slums affect the people by giving them diseases that can be deadly. Slums are so dirty that the food and water that the people consume gets contaminated which leads to them getting diseases that can potentially kill them if not treated. Part of the cause of the pollution in the slums is that they are overpopulated.
Secondarily, overpopulation also affects people living in the slums. Fink said, "Kibera's true population isn't known, but there are probably as many people living here as there are in San Francisco, packed into housing few Americans could phantom."
There is more or less the same amount of people in the slum as there is in San Francisco. The slums are overpopulated and they are still increasing. Even though slums being overpopulated the government still does not care for the people living in slums.
Lastly, slums do not get any government care. "The slums are like self-contained cities, but they operate with little official recognition or assistance", said Fink. Slums have very little help from the government. Slums get hardly any help from the government which means that they have little or no medications and they do not appear on the maps which makes it harder for the slum to be found. That concludes how the government treats slums.
That concludes why slums have a negative effect on people. Slums negatively affect human population because they are very polluted, overcrowded, and the government does not care about them. The pollution in slums leads to death. The overpopulation in slums affect the amount of resources people get. The government not helping the slums can also lead to death. If not properly managed, slums can eventually be more than half of the population.
