Tonight, I’m going to hold an exceptional conference about the United States, titled “The United States, the sick country”.
This study was published in Le Monde Newspaper yesterday.
Of course, you won’t find similar information in any US newspaper, It would be immediately censored by the American dictator (but I can assure you this is no "fake news").
Two mortality studies conclude that the recent decline in US life expectancy is related to a "systemic" problem.
The United States is suffering from a "systemic" disease, and this should encourage other developed countries to be vigilant. This is, in essence, the conclusion of two studies published on Wednesday 15 August, in the British Medical Journal. The first one, conducted by Steven Woolf (Virginia Commonwealth University), reveals a worrying increase in mortality among middle-aged American adults over the past 17 years, and particularly since 2012, when US life expectancy has begun to stagnate, before declining from 2015.
That year, says the second study, conducted by Jessica Ho (University of Southern California) and Arun Hendi (Princeton University), a dozen rich countries including France simultaneously experienced a significant decline in their life expectancy compared to 2014. Sudden and unprecedented, this fall was however generally offset by a rebound the following year, with the exception of the United Kingdom and the United States.
In the United States, this drop in life expectancy recorded in 2015 was confirmed in 2016. The index then stood at 78.6 years, 0.3 years lower than in 2014. The Associated Press reported that 2017 should see another drop in life expectancy. It would be the third consecutive year of decline - a situation that has been unprecedented for several decades.
First observation: overdoses are the leading cause of increased mortality in all groups. Mortality rates due to the use of drugs or drugs increase by more than 410% among Native Americans, 150% among blacks, 80% among Hispanics ...
These are the stigmas of the opioid crisis that has hit the United States since the marketing of powerful analgesics close to morphine in the mid-1990s. These have plunged more than 2 million Americans into dependency. This observation is not new.
Strong social inequalities
But, says Steven Woolf and his coauthors, this is not the only cause. "Mid-life mortality rates," the researchers explain, "have also increased for a wide range of diseases that affect multiple functions and organs of the human body. For the Amerindians, mortality rates between 25 and 64 years have increased for twelve different causes, including diseases due to hypertension (+ 270%), liver cancer (+ 115%), viral hepatitis ( + 112%), diseases of the central nervous system (+ 100%) ... Suicides, alcohol-related or non-alcoholic liver diseases, brain tumors, respiratory or metabolic diseases or obesity increase mortality in several groups.
Mortality rates are rising across the entire US population for a dozen diseases. This signals, for the authors, that the deterioration of health in the United States is due to "deep and systemic causes". "We suspect that rising income inequality, educational deficits, social divide and stress can play a significant role," says Woolf. Other factors may include lack of universal access to care, public possession of firearms, and high rates of obesity. "
Epidemiologist Philip Landrigan (Boston College), who did not participate in the study, welcomed "very solid" work. "The data presented do not allow us to distinguish the profound determinants of this deterioration in the health status of Americans. But it is clear that when you create strong social inequalities, you create a category of the population that ends up seeing their life expectancy decrease, he says. The poor are also those who are most exposed to almost all environmental pollutants such as lead, pesticides, air pollution ... This potential factor is frequently neglected. "
In addition, this deterioration in the health of Americans comes at a time when smoking is at a historically low level in the US (about 15.5% of the adult population was smoking in 2016) and the average consumption of alcohol increased only marginally over the study period.
For Jay Olshansky (University of Illinois), who predicted in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine, an imminent reversal of trend in the United States, it also signals that "the era where we could win a lot life expectancy is over”.
Note: I was talking in a message about a flat situated in New York for 28 million $:
http://www.nomaher.com/forum/index.php?topic=1020.msg29404#msg29404But in my opinion, it’s not a good investment. Besides the view of Central Park, what’s the point in living in such a place? Imagine a mere power cut, without an elevator, this flat would just become inaccessible:
196 Replies
16594 Views