Why Americans Die Younger: Guns, drugs and car crashes
NEW YORK — The average American resident will die as much as two years younger than if they lived in Western Europe or Japan. This can be attributed, in part, to three of the darker elements of life in the U.S.: gun violence, drug overdoses and death on the road.
More than 100,000 people in the U.S. die of these causes every year. For each category, the death rate is far higher in America than in other wealthy countries, according to research published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The disparity is evident in comparison with each of the 12 developed countries that have comparable mortality data available, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
The U.S. could narrow the gap, but “as a country, we have chosen not to by not investing the resources in injury prevention that would be needed,” said Rebecca Cunningham, an emergency physician and director of the Injury Research Center at the University of Michigan. She wasn’t involved in the JAMA report, which was written by researchers at the U.S. government’s National Center for Health Statistics and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
http://www.columbian.com/news/2016/feb/10/why-americans-die-younger-guns-drugs-and-car-crashes/
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