Why Americans don't live as long as Europeans

[Live and Learn]

Why Americans don't live as long as Europeans

By Carina Storrs, Special to CNN
Updated 2:23 PM ET, Tue February 9, 2016 | Video Source: CNN

(CNN)Americans die younger than people in other high-income countries, and drug poisonings, gun injuries and motor vehicle crashes are largely to blame, a study finds.

To see how the United States measures up in terms of life expectancy, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compared its death rates in 2012 with those of a dozen other countries with similar economies, including the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany and other European countries.

The researchers found that men and women in the United States lived 2.2 fewer years than residents in similar countries. American men and women could only look forward to a life expectancy of 76.4 and 81.2 years, respectively, compared with the 78.6 and 83.4 years of their peers abroad.

"The idea that Americans live several years shorter than we would expect them to, given the level of development, is sort of already known, but every time I come across that number it seems staggering that we get two fewer years of life just for living here," said Andrew Fenelon, a senior service fellow at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics and senior author of the study, which was published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/09/health/american-life-expectancy-shorter-than-europeans/index.html

[Recursion]

1. Ooh! I guessed right: guns, cars, and drugs (nt)

[Live and Learn]

2. Yep. nt

[applegrove]

3. Guns.

[olddots]

4. to get this on topic

maybe its because we have to sit thru these elections .

[CrawlingChaos]

5. But prior to the '80s, our lifespans were similar to Europeans

The Reagan era. We've been experiencing a toxic buildup of FREEDOM ever since.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Plus infant deaths (which the article mentions, but doesn't quantify)

number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html

USA 5.87
some of the comparison countries:
UK 4.38
Germany 3.43
Spain 3.30
Italy 3.29
France 3.28
Japan 2.08

Say that's an average of 3.37, ie 2.5/1,000 births below the US figure, or about 1 in 400. So that shaves off about 0.2 years from the total US life expectancy - less than guns, drugs or vehicle accidents for men, but more than guns and crashes for women, and about the same (9% of 2.2 years) for drug poisonings for women.