Good (health) news you probably missed
Do you ever tire of the drumbeat of health problems reported in the MSM? We are conditioned to fear leaving the house or eating ANYTHING (and most accidents occur at home!). Since the threats are omnipresent and clearly overwhelming, of course SOMEONE must save us from them. Guess who?
Well, sometimes injection of even a bit of data into the discussion is like taking a pill for the pain. The new publication from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health, United States, 2007 is a compendium of more than 150 tables reporting data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data confirm some common observations (e.g. our population is older, more divere ethnically and has more foreign-born members), but most of all confirm that America is not the health backwater that we read about in the newspapers.
Life expectancy is at an all-time high. Females live longer than males, but a baby born in 1900 would live until 1948 (men) or 1951 (women) -- 48 and 51 years, respectively. Boomers born in 1950 will live, on average until 2015 (men) or 2021 (women) -- 65.5 and 71 years, respectively). The new report predicts children born in 2004 will live until 2079 (men) and 2084 (women) -- 75.2 and 80.4 years respectively. We take it for granted, but it's big news. And good news.
Chiidren are healthier. Sure, anti-salt activists intend to bombard the media with stories next month about how UNhealthy children are, but the facts say otherwise. In just the past quarter century, the number of children who died before age 14 has been cut in half -- in half! (since the mid-20th century, the rate has been cut 80%). Youth and teens are 60% less likely to be in "fair" or "poor" health. Almost as good as Ivory Soap, 98.2% of our children are healthy.
Adults, too. Despite our aging population, the percentage of all people in "fair" or "poor" health has dropped in a decade by more than 10% -- from 10.4% in 1991 to 9.2% in 2005. Physical limitations have also been dropping, from 13.3% to 11.7% over the past eight years while age-adjusted vision- and hearing-impairment, over the same period, have improved a remarkable 65% (dropping from 10% to 3.5%).
Mortality continues to decline. The new figures confirm those we reported earlier this year in comparing the U.S. with Americans' steady salt intakes with mortality figures in Finland which compromised its health improvements as it reduced its population's salt intake. Overall, age-adjusted mortality for all of the leading causes of death are in decline -- cut in half since 1950. In just the past 14 years, deaths from the leading cause, heart disease, have dropped by a third. Deaths from the second-leading cause, cancer, have fallen 14% and the third, stroke, by a whopping 72% (with no reduction in dietary salt). The key is age-adjusting. If we don't die of something in our youth or early adulthood, we reach old age where we (all, eventually) die of "old age" ailiments like respiratory infections or alzheimers's. In fact, the biggest risk of dying is getting old.
Great news, huh? Didn't read about it in the paper? We can blame the journalists, of course, but don't excuse the government with its own built-in bias to focus on health problems. How's a bureaucrat to extract your tax dollars and convert them into budgets to keep the federal bureaucracy going if the problems are going away?
HHS guided the press on what to report (e.g. "the high prevalence of people with unhealthy lifestyles and behaviors" for which HHS has remedial programs. One of those is likely to be universal sodium reduction -- a policy with no proven health benefit. Of course, the big bugaboo is overweight, but we've been seeing studies (also from CDC if memory serves) showing that the overweight group actually scored better health outcomes.
Let's take heart from the good news of our health statistics and use these valued data to direct and prioritize future investments in Americans' health.
