Maybe because I am not directly involved in a health profession this quote from the outreach campaign of a new public television series surprised me: "On average, poor immigrants of color actually arrive in the U.S. healthier than the average American. But the longer they are here, the less healthy they become."

In Becoming American, part of the 4-hour public television series, Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, viewers follow Mexican immigrants laboring on the mushroom farms of Pennsylvania to find out why they are healthier, what's grinding down their health over time (and even more so, that of their children), and what they are doing to reverse this trend.

Unnatural Causes is a four-hour series that producers say will, for the first time on television, sound the alarm about the extent of our alarming socio-economic and racial disparities in health-and search for their causes. The companion Web site is an interactive work-in-progress that will officially launch in early 2008 in conjunction with the PBS broadcast of the series.

There is some content available now on the Web site. New Routes grantees may find it interesting to watch a public outreach site being built around broadcast content.