Health Statistics

The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is smaller than it has ever been, thanks largely to a decline in the number of deaths resulting from heart disease and HIV infection, a new analysis has found. That's the good news. The bad news is that the gap is still large: A black baby boy born today can expect to live 5.4 fewer years, on average, than his white counterpart, and a black baby girl will die 3.7 years earlier, on average, than her white counterpart. What's more, the narrowing of the gap between 2003 and 2008 is due in part to a troubling development among whites: They are more likely than in the past to die from overdoses of powerful prescription medications like OxyContin and Vicodin, along with other unintentional poisonings.

It would be silly to try to reduce the American character -- if there even is such a thing -- to a single graph. But the one pictured above, taken from a report released Wednesday by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, does a pretty good job conveying the truth behind one of the developed world's favorite stereotypes of the United States. We are, indeed, far more prone to lethal violence than any other country in the developed world. Why? The report wasn't designed to answer that particular question.

Anesthesia is not an area of medicine most folks profess to understand. As one anesthesiologist put it: "The lay public has the notion that we knock people on the head and they go to sleep, and then we knock them on the head again and they wake up." But today, even doctors are realizing how little they know about the effects of heavy sedation.

The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is smaller than it has ever been, thanks largely to a decline in the number of deaths resulting from heart disease and HIV infection, a new analysis has found. That's the good news. The bad news is that the gap is still large: A black baby boy born today can expect to live 5.4 fewer years, on average, than his white counterpart, and a black baby girl will die 3.7 years earlier, on average, than her white counterpart. What's more, the narrowing of the gap between 2003 and 2008 is due in part to a troubling development among whites: They are more likely than in the past to die from overdoses of powerful prescription medications like OxyContin and Vicodin, along with other unintentional poisonings.

An estimated 62 million U.S. women are in their childbearing years. Of those, 62% use some kind of contraception. Among those who don't, 31% are pregnant, trying to get pregnant, postpartum, sterile or not sexually active. The other 7% take their chances. Among those using contraceptives, here's what they use: The pill 28% Sterilization 27.1% Condom 16.1% Vasectomy 9.9% IUD 5.5% Withdrawal 5.2% Injectable Depo-Provera 3.2% Vaginal ring 2.4 Rhythm 0.9 Other: 0.6 Statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Guttmacher Institute.

The signs for Robert Martinez were not good when he arrived at the hospital four months ago. They rarely are when a body is stripped almost completely of the familiar insulating layer called skin. With more than 80% of his body burned in a refinery steam explosion and his lungs horribly damaged by contaminants from the blast, Martinez could breathe only with the aid of a ventilator as he lay comatose in his specially equipped bed at Torrance Memorial Medical Center.

It would be silly to try to reduce the American character -- if there even is such a thing -- to a single graph. But the one pictured above, taken from a report released Wednesday by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, does a pretty good job conveying the truth behind one of the developed world's favorite stereotypes of the United States. We are, indeed, far more prone to lethal violence than any other country in the developed world. Why? The report wasn't designed to answer that particular question.

Just as this week's two apparently harmless fires at the Chernobyl nuclear plant rekindled popular fears in Ukraine, Turkey has been reliving its own nightmare of those fearful days of radioactive clouds and rain. But whereas Ukrainians have lived for years with the impact of the April, 1986, disaster--8,000 people are thought to have died as a result--the Turks 700 miles to the south had always been told that they had little to worry about.

Japan's women live longest, Hungarians have the highest suicide rate and more people living in industrialized nations die from smoking than from any form of violence, a new survey by the World Health Organization says. The figures are among thousands packed into WHO's 423-page statistical yearbook, which includes a comprehensive mortality survey based on reports from 55 countries, mostly in the Americas and Europe. The new edition, released this month, covers data through 1989.

Banking away from the freeways toward the seashore, Laguna Canyon Road fairly sings of the beauty, escape and fun ahead. It skims past a shallow lagoon, then sweeps by towering eucalyptus trees and cattle grazing on hillsides. The road spills out onto Coast Highway and Main Beach, where on a warm fall day the carefree and the bronzed play volleyball and bask in the sunshine.

Home birth is making a marked resurgence in the United States, according to data released Thursday by the federal government. A century ago, most births took place at home. But the rate fell steadily and slipped to less than 1% of all births by 1969 and just over 0.5% in 2004. Though still not common, home births have risen 29% from 2004 to 2009, according to the statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, 0.72% of all births took place at home.

An estimated 62 million U.S. women are in their childbearing years. Of those, 62% use some kind of contraception. Among those who don't, 31% are pregnant, trying to get pregnant, postpartum, sterile or not sexually active. The other 7% take their chances. Among those using contraceptives, here's what they use: The pill 28% Sterilization 27.1% Condom 16.1% Vasectomy 9.9% IUD 5.5% Withdrawal 5.2% Injectable Depo-Provera 3.2% Vaginal ring 2.4 Rhythm 0.9 Other: 0.6 Statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Guttmacher Institute.

For the first time in three decades, the rate of premature births in the United States has declined for two years in a row, a finding that suggests the country is finally beginning to make some progress in the battle against prematurity. The declines were widespread and encompassing, including babies of mothers in all age groups under 40, all ethnicities, singleton and multiple births, vaginal and caesarean births, and every state except Hawaii, according to the report issued Tuesday by the government's National Center for Health Statistics.

Birth weights in the United States are on the decline, a study has found. The report, released Thursday, found a small but significant decrease in average birth weights from 1990 to 2005, for reasons that scientists say are unclear. The numbers, published in the February issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, mark a shift from earlier reports that noted a rise in birth weights in the latter part of the 20th century. They also seem to go against conventional wisdom, experts said.

California Latinos have been nearly twice as likely as whites to die of H1N1 flu since the pandemic began last spring, according to statewide figures released Thursday by the California Department of Public Health. Over the same months, blacks in the state have been 50% more likely to die of H1N1 flu than whites, the report said. "Not everybody has been impacted equally" by H1N1, said state epidemiologist Dr. Gilberto Chavez, who added that statistics have shown "very important racial disparities" in H1N1 mortality and hospitalization rates.

Americans may not be collectively doomed to die in their recliners after all, one hand in the chips bag, the other stretching for the remote. Obesity levels seem to be leveling off or slowing across most of the population, according to two new comprehensive studies of the nation's heft. The assessments, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are a welcome respite from the seemingly endless reports of Americans getting fatter and fatter. The latest of several to find an obesity plateau, they suggest that those earlier findings were not aberrations but that Americans may truly have turned a corner.

Orange County residents are healthier than Californians as a whole and had lower rates of teen pregnancy and AIDS cases, according to a state health study released Tuesday. In a study that measures various indicators of health in a number of categories, including causes of death, Orange County did better than the statewide average in all areas except the rate of low-birth-weight infants.

Cancer deaths and the rate of new cases are continuing their encouraging downward trend--in part the result of American adults quitting smoking--but federal health officials on Tuesday warned that lung cancer rates are likely to jump again unless smoking among adolescents is curbed.

The current wave of pandemic H1N1 appears to have peaked, with four weeks of declines in several key indicators, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. Despite the decrease, the outbreak is continuing to take a heavy toll of hospitalizations and deaths, especially among children. Widespread activity of H1N1, also called swine flu, was reported in 32 states -- including California -- in the week ending Nov. 21, down from 43 states the week before and 48 a month ago. Influenza-like illnesses accounted for 4.3% of all visits to doctors' offices during the week, down from nearly double that proportion in October.

Between 1.8 million and 5.7 million Americans caught pandemic H1N1 influenza this spring, as many as 21,000 were hospitalized, and perhaps 800 died, according to new estimates by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The revised numbers suggest that even larger numbers will become infected during this flu season. Estimates, as opposed to specific numbers, are the best data available. Many cases are not reported to public health authorities, and the CDC stopped requiring laboratory confirmation of new cases when labs were becoming overwhelmed.