Life Expectency starting to drop for some in the US
In large part, this kind of thing was expected to happen thanks to the obesity of today's population, but whatever the cause, people in the US, and particularly women, are starting to die younger.
For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.
In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.
The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.
I do have one major nitpick with the article, though. For all of it's searching for possible causes, it leaves out one rather major and glaring one. One that can be guessed at when they widen their scope for a moment.
The phenomenon appears to be not only new but distinctly American.
"If you look in Western Europe, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, we don't see this," Murray said.
You see, there's something all of those countries have that the US lacks. Something that would definitely affect the poorest members of a population far more than the wealthiest.
Universal Health Care.
To me, that's the kind of thing I'd start looking at if it turned out that the US was alone among the industrialized nations to see a significant fraction of its population's life expectancy drop, among people who are less likely to have health insurance.
