In 1995, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, there were 43,115 deaths from the disease and its complications. Twenty years later, our current opiate epidemic has passed that gruesome marker, racking up 52,404 deaths. Today, opioid-related deaths outnumber those resulting from car accidents or guns.
According to Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, these are “deaths of despair,” and combined with deaths from alcohol and suicide they have resulted in an alarming increase in the mortality rate of white, non-Hispanic Americans in mid-life. Their report, titled "Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century,” was published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) in September 2015 to widespread headlines. Last week they issued a new paper for the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, titled "Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century.” Jared Keller, writing for Pacific Standard, reports that:
To be more exact, Case and Deaton found that middle-aged, non-Hispanic Americans without a college degree experience a significantly higher mortality rate than those in advanced countries like the United Kingdom or Germany. While everyone else in the United States is getting healthier and living longer, it’s that segment of whites who accounted for “half a million deaths” between 1999 and 2013.
To scientists, the sudden die-off in middle-of-the-road white Americans constitutes a phenomenon “unprecedented in the annals of public health among developed nations” with the exception of the post-U.S.S.R. deaths of Russian males and, in some ways, the first shock waves of the AIDs crisis in the early 1980s.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2nyc7VN
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