Friday, May 15, 2015

Here's 'most distinctive' death cause in your state

While some causes of death such as cancer are fairly common everywhere, some causes of death are much more common in certain areas. The following map displays the "most distinctive" cause of death for each state, Rachael Rettner writes for Live Science.
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Some of the distinctive causes are common, such as the flu, which is listed as most distinctive for Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. For Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, pneumoconiosis—a set of lung diseases contracted through dust inhalation, usually by coal miners who call it "black lung" diesease—was the distinctive cause of death.

In Tennessee and Alabama, the distinctive cause of death is accidental discharge of firearms.

"Although chronic-disease-prevention efforts should continue to emphasize the most common [national] conditions, an outlier map such as this one should also be of interest to public health professionals," the researchers wrote in their report, which is published in the May issue of the journal Preventing Chronic Disease.

The researchers obtained a list of 113 causes of death from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then they calculated the rate of death for each cause in each state and divided that rate of death from that cause in the entire U.S. (Read more)

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