truthout.org - Unequal America by Elizabeth Gudrais

Unequal America

http://www.truthout.org/article/unequal-america

Elizabeth Gudrais reports for Harvard Magazine: "When Majid Ezzati thinks about
declining life expectancy, he says, 'I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think
of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union.' But such a
decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States. Between 1983
and 1999, men's life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties,
according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international
health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues.... The
United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world's longest life
expectancy. It doesn't even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the
richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati's finding is unsettling on
its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health
disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but
concentrated among the disadvantaged."



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