National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States recently aired a story titled ‘Live free and die? The sad state of US life expectancy’ examined the wide disparity in life expectancy between the United States and peer countries.
While most countries experienced a drop during the Covid-19 pandemic and recovered after vaccines and other treatments were implemented, life expectancy in the United States fell off a cliff and never recovered.
The graph that NPR published is shocking. It demonstrates that life expectancy in the United States is lower than in Cuba or Lebanon. The figure has been known since shortly before Christmas, when health officials announced that the country’s life expectancy had dropped dramatically to 76 years for the second year in a row.
However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last week that maternal mortality in the country will reach an all-time high in 2021. Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found rising mortality rates among children and adolescents in the United States. This means you can’t blame Covid-19 solely for the decline in life expectancy and expect it to rebound as soon as the pandemic is eradicated.
The maternal mortality rate in 2021 was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than ten times higher than rates in other high-income countries such as Australia, Austria, Israel, Japan, and Spain, which all had rates between 2 and 3 deaths per 100,000 in 2020.
Steven Woolf, the lead author of the JAMA paper and emeritus director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, put it succinctly about children’s increased mortality rate. “This is the first time in my career that I’ve seen an increase in paediatric mortality; it’s been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember.” It is now increasing at a rate unprecedented in at least a half-century.”
According to the paper, this goes far beyond stereotypes of Americans who have poor eating habits or other unhealthy addictions. It discovered that “American children are less likely than children in other high-income countries to live to the age of five.” It goes on to say that “even Americans with healthy behaviours, such as those who are not obese or smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their counterparts in other countries.”
The researchers identified what they called the “US health disadvantage,” which essentially means that simply living in the country is bad for your health and causes you to die younger than in other comparable countries. Given the recent environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, where carcinogenic chemicals were allowed to burn freely in the air and deposit in the soil, this could also be a factor. The incident has also had an effect on a major metropolitan area, as well as my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Furthermore, residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of the largest American cities, are being advised to drink bottled water because more than 8,000 gallons of latex-finishing solution spilled into Otter Creek in Bristol, near Philadelphia, on March 24th. Butyl acrylate is among the chemicals in the spill, which was also released in East Palestine. Such environmental disasters appear to be becoming more common.
Perhaps the most perplexing statistic, at least to a non-American, is that gunfire has been the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the United States since 2020, surpassing even car accidents, which previously topped the list. Guns were involved in nearly 20% of all deaths among Americans aged one to 18 in the previous three years. In comparison to other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States is the only one where guns are the leading cause of death for people in this age group – no other country even ranks in the top four.
