Researchers at Princeton have revealed an alarming and surprising trend in mortality rates among middle-aged white Americans. This group’s death rates have increased rather than decreased over the past fifteen years. The researchers said:
“This was absolutely a surprise to us. It knocked us off our chairs – everyone’s been stunned.”
Why the surprise, you might ask? The answer is that in all comparable countries and among other racial and ethnic groups, the death rate for this group is falling. Better health care and more informed lifestyle choices have no doubt helped.
But middle-aged white Americans have a startlingly higher mortality rate and this is puzzling health experts, especially as the numbers had been falling at a steady 2 percent annual rate in the period 1978-1998.
To give you an idea what that means in real numbers, look at how many deaths were caused by the AIDS epidemic in the same period. The number of Americas who died of AIDS was around the 650,000. This is roughly the same figure for the white middle- aged Americans who have died since 1998.
Yet the AIDS deaths received all sorts of media attention, and prescription painkiller overdose received almost none. Why? Because AIDS deaths were exploited and manipulated by various religious and ultra conservative groups to push their nauseating views on life, morals and death. AIDS was seen as the punishment for sodomy.
Far too many people are dying from prescription painkiller overdoses. The CDC figures are frightening, to say the least. Just think that these overdoses are killing 15,000 Americans a year. That is more than the heroin and cocaine drug addiction deaths combined.
Many Americans are dying off because of unwise health choices and their addiction to leading a pain-free existence. Here we have 5 percent of the world’s population gobbling up 80 percent of the global supply of painkillers available. Sales have skyrocketed and are now worth $11 billion every year.
Can you see scary headlines about this new epidemic? I doubt it – the Big Pharma lobby will see to that. As for the far Christian right, it is just not sexy enough, like the AIDS epidemic was. God’s wrath and painkillers don’t make such great sermons!
Yet the same number of Americans will die but nobody seems to give a damn.
Featured image by Casey Fleser via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
