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« Ten Percent | Main | Naming the Baby Boom »

April 23, 2008 |Permalink |Comments (0)

Not So Old Ladies


Your health care system is run for profit, results--- not so much. Seriously, this is not a story about how we are worse off than Britain or France or Canada or Cuba, this is a story about an absolute decline in lifespan for women in 1,000 American counties.

Something is going terribly wrong.

Longevity for women is falling in the USA.

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.

The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure. It reflects the long-term consequences of smoking, a habit that women took up in large numbers decades after men did, and the slowing of the historic decline in heart disease deaths.

The WaPo has the rest here

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