Toronto housing crisis
The Toronto housing crisis contributed to the Toronto respiratory health crisis in several ways. It has remained unresolved despite Canada's signing the UN Social and Economic Rights Convention of 1976, which guarantees a right to housing. Ignoring it has had these consequences:
- thousands of very vulnerable individuals in a prime position to be infected, e.g. by SARS, thanks to decreased immune system capacity due to spending all day outdoors, even in winter, and all night for those who refuse to use:
- homeless shelters that do not meet even UN High Commission for Refugees standards, and which provide ideal spreading grounds for infectious disease, not just to the homeless but to
- community and volunteer groups, and dedicated professionals already overworked in the Toronto hospital crisis, who pick up by conscience the off-loading or "downloading" of these treaty responsibilities on charities and churches.
Mental health services were also cut. The implications are summarized in a 2003 letter to the WHO:
- "There are many people walking the streets of our community who need regular follow-up with a psychiatrist who simply don't get it until their cases demand hospitalization for acute episodes. I'm sure you can imagine the public health implications of having people struggling to function on the streets."
The Toronto smog crisis had already increased the vulnerability of Toronto citizens. But the housing crisis specifically made the homeless, volunteer and hospital workers more vulnerable - extraordinarily dangerous since these groups contact more than an average number of other people per day. The Toronto SARS crisis took many of these workers out of action in quarantine, and the facilities in which they worked. The combination of factors came to be known as the Toronto respiratory health crisis, which furthered SARS asa global epidemic.
