*Twelve states, including the whole of New England, Pennsylvania, and the Upper Midwest, have not a single county where life expectancy has declined.
*Life expectancy increased sharply in New York City, in large measure because of better treatment of AIDS patients, which drastically cut the mortality rate.
Overall, the report on life expectancy underscores the catastrophic effects of economic slump and growing social inequality on the physical survival of large portions of the working class population in the United States. Capitalism is not only inflicting unemployment, poverty, homelessness and hunger, it is literally killing young people, the elderly and people of working age.
Press accounts of the IHME study claimed that the authors discounted the impact of poverty and lack of education and emphasized the significance of behavioral factors such as smoking and obesity. This reporting demonstrates more the bias of the corporate-controlled media than a fair reading of the actual outlook of the scientists involved.
They write in the report summary: "Strong relationships have been documented between race/ethnicity, individual or community income, income inequality, and mortality in the US." Later, they add, "Any analysis of causes of disparities will draw substantial attention to poverty, inequality, race, and ethnicity, but some of the poor performance and falling performance must be related to other factors."
Dr. Ali Mokdad, an IHME official who is researching causal factors affecting life expectancy, listed four reasons for the trends found in the report: poverty and lack of education, access to health care, quality of medical care, and preventable risk factors.
The preventable conditions like obesity, untreated high blood pressure and smoking, are also correlated indirectly with poverty and lack of education, as well as lack of access to health care, which is particularly pronounced in isolated rural areas.
The tobacco companies cultivated the women's market in the United States with heavy advertising in the decades after World War II. Despite the overall decline in smoking from 1965 on, after the Surgeon General's report identified smoking as a major cause of cancer and lung disease, American women have ever since had a higher rate of smoking than women in other countries, which has had long-term consequences for their health.
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