Newswire:

In America, Female Life Expectancy Drops... What The Heck?

Some ominous news: life expectancy has dropped for a “significant number of American women.” [Washington Post]

The last time this happened? “...The Spanish influenza of 1918.”

According to a study by researchers at the University of Washington, in almost a thousand counties in America, home to about 12 percent of America’s women, female “life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s.”

Where are the counties? All over, but most evident in rural areas “in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine.”

The most extreme examples are “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 reasons? “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.”

It also has to do with obesity: “33 percent of women are now obese, compared with 31 percent of men. Extreme obesity is twice as common in women (7 percent) as in men (3 percent).”

“I think this is a harbinger. This is not going to be isolated to this set of counties, is my guess,” said Christopher J.L. Murray, a physician and epidemiologist who led the study.

And, it’s very American. “If you look in Western Europe, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, we don’t see this,” Murray said.

Isn’t the future supposed to bring longer lives?

--------

Comments
Leave a comment about this article below. For more discussion, visit our community page and sign up for your own Campus Progress blog!