Health and Health Services Use by Women in Urban and Rural Areas in Highly and Extremely Highly Socioeconomically Marginalized Zones of the Chiapas Border Region

The article analyzes a diverse number of indicators of health, focusing on patients' self-perception of health. The analysis makes use of a case study from the border region of Guatemala & Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico. The study covered 2,558 women between the ages of 15 & 49, living in urban & rural areas that are characterized by a very high degree of socioeconomic marginalization. These women were not only likely to suffer from ill health, poverty, & lack of local health services, but they compared unfavorably in all of these areas to women whose degree of socioeconomic marginalization was not as high. Another major finding is the fact that the low values observed in these diverse indicators corresponded to a lesser degree of use of those few health services that were available, which suggests a low self-perception of risks to health. Tables, 1 Map, References. R. Young