According to new data, "real menace" claims more American lives than obesity and drug overdoses.
According to recent research issued in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Monday, poverty is the fourth greatest cause of mortality in the country, accounting for the deaths of an estimated 183,000 Americans aged 15 and over in 2019. This study is one of the first to accurately measure the total deaths effectively caused by poverty, which includes not just to malnutrition and hunger along with a lack of accessibility to doctors and life-saving medicine, in addition to a greater probability of harmful environmental exposures and factors that cause pressure on their health. Poverty is defined as earnings or less 50% of the median US income. Poverty has generally been related to a shorter life expectancy.
In 2019, many deaths occur due to suicide, firearms, violence, obesity, diabetes, and drug overdoses, whose causes of death were shown to be less lethal than poverty. More specifically, the study also showed that persons who were poor had a similar survival rate up to the age of 40, at which point they started dying at considerably higher rates than their more affluent counterparts. When people reached their 70s, though, survival rates did start to converge again.
Researchers noted that their findings were based on data collected immediately before to the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a rise in mortality rates across all demographics and put a burden on our economy, healthcare systems, and other life-saving resources.They said the numbers are believed to be a "conservative" estimate. According to David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside, "Clearly, poverty was a contributing factor to deaths from COVID. Hence, I would anticipate a significant increase in poverty-associated mortality after 2019. Poverty laden people experiences chronic diseases, greater mortality, and shorter life expectancies. Regrettably, after falling for five straight years, the US poverty rate climbed to 11.4% in 2020, or 37.2 million individuals.
Also, the US has a lower life expectancy than the majority of wealthy countries.
