Guns, car crashes and drugs cut US male life expectancy by a year, research says

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Guns, car crashes and drugs cut US male life expectancy by a year, research says

Amanda Holpuch in New York
Tuesday 9 February 2016 16.00 GMT

Gun injuries, car crashes and drug poisoning account for more than one year of shortened life expectancy in American men compared to men in other high-income countries, according to Centers for Disease Control research .

An American man’s life expectancy is cut five months and 14 days shorter because of gun injuries compared with men in 12 other countries, said the research letter, published Tuesday in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama).

Researchers have known that life expectancy in the US is lower than it is in other high-income countries, but the new letter shows that these three types of injuries have a substantial impact on life expectancy in the US.

“I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of the impact of firearm deaths, that they’re only 1%-2% of deaths in the US but responsible for 20% of the gap in life expectancy between the US and other countries in men,” said Andrew Fenelon, the lead author of the letter.

The letter is also surprising because Congress has fought proposals to fund CDC research on gun violence since 1996, despite calls from leading medical groups and public health experts. This is thus one of the few government-backed analyses of trends in gun injuries.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/09/guns-car-crashes-drugs-us-male-life-expectancy

[valerief]

1. For women, it's drugs (re injury deaths).

For men, gun deaths account for 5.4 months of the life expectancy gap. Car crashes account for 3.4 months and drug poisoning for 3.6 months.

Drug poisoning was the leading injury cause of death for women, however, which the author letters said could be tied to the prescription opioid epidemic.

But overall, injuries account for only 0.42 years of the age gap for women.

Fenelon said that the data does not just reflect “bad decisions made by Americans” but shows more broad factors are at play. Fenelon said: “It’s something broader because you see this difference in all these causes of death that aren’t necessarily linked.”

Maybe it's that War on Drugs and Racist Cop shit so prized in the U.S.