The Roper Center’s Public Opinion Matters feature for this month is Poverty. The feature includes current information as well as links to related articles and archived polls.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has released results from the 2005 American Time Use Survey. The survey covers employment, housework, child care, and leisure activities. See the BLS press release with technical notes and tables (PDF).

NPR’s Morning Edition looks at ways to reduce maternal and infant mortality in Africa.

The Population Reference Bureau has released the 2006 edition of its World Population Data Sheet. The Data Sheet can be downloaded in PDF format, and an HIV/AIDS policy brief, webcast, slide presentation, and news release are also available. The Data Sheet shows how migration is reshaping the US and the world.

Health care makes up an increasingly large part of the US economy, according to a New York Times article (August 22, 2006).

Medicaid Patients Increasingly Concentrated Among Physicians, a new report from the Center for Studying Health System Change, presents findings from a nationally representative survey of US physicians.

Older adults with lower household income were more likely to feel limited in doing basic physical activities than their wealthier peers, according to a study published in the August 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (PubMed abstract, NIH press release).

Health disparities may be more closely tied to neighborhoods and rural/urban differences than to race, according to a post on Science Blog. The post cites an article about heat wave deaths appearing in the August issue of American Sociological Review (Yahoo! news story) and an article about black mortality rates in Harlem and Pitt County, North Carolina in the August issue of Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (Health Behavior News Service story).

USA Today looks at whether walk-in health clinics in retail stores could cut health care costs (August 24, 2006).

The Changing Demographic Profile of the United States is a new report from the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress that provides nonpartisan research reports to the House and Senate.