Health Statistics

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.

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.

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.

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.

As an age, the big 5-0 is not quite old but certainly not young. You can embrace it with a big birthday bash or contemptuously tear up the inevitable invitation to join AARP. Nevertheless, visiting the doctor for a checkup at the half-century mark is bound to be a sobering reality check. Even using the word "century" in relation to one's own age ... ouch. "What a doctor sees is the sum total of what's happened for those 50 years," said Dr.

Survival rates for lung transplant patients are soaring as surgeons adopt techniques developed during the last decade by a group of doctors in St. Louis. Surgeon Joel D. Cooper and his colleagues at Washington University reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that single-lung recipients had a 90% survival rate using the procedure. The survival rate was 82% for those who received two lungs.

To borrow from that Nancy Sinatra song from the '60s, these feet were made for walkin', and that's just what we do--to the tune of 75,000 miles by middle age. The California Podiatric Medical Assn. and the American Podiatric Medical Assn. say that's the mileage we put in from daily work and leisure activities. In a lifetime, they say, we rack up 115,000 miles. In doing so, many people can be put at greater risk for developing debilitating foot and ankle conditions, the associations say.

The World Health Organization on Friday declared tuberculosis a global emergency, saying the disease will claim more than 30 million lives in the next decade unless action is taken now. "Tuberculosis today is humanity's greatest killer, and it is out of control in many parts of the world," said Arati Kochi, manager of WHO's tuberculosis program, at a news conference announcing a plan to combat what has been dubbed the "forgotten epidemic."

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.

Medications banned or highly restricted in the United States because of severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects are being smuggled in from Mexico and peddled out of back-room shops across Southern California. These potentially dangerous drugs, which multinational pharmaceutical companies market in Mexico, where regulations and enforcement are less stringent, have shown up consistently in more than 70 raids over the last year of markets, dress shops and swap meets catering to Latino immigrants.

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.

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.

Rates of premature birth and low birth-weight babies showed the first decline since the early 1980s, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. The pre-term birth rate, defined as infants delivered at less than 37 weeks of pregnancy, fell to 12.7% of all births. The rates of low birth-weight babies declined slightly to 8.2%. Births to teenagers increased for the second straight year, now accounting for 42.5 of every 1,000 U.S. births, and births to unmarried women rose to nearly 40% of all births.

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 flu season in California this winter is turning out to be one of the mildest in recent years. The number of severe influenza cases resulting in deaths in children is also down. There have been three pediatric influenza-associated deaths so far this winter, with deaths reported in Riverside, Fresno and Alameda counties; in the same time period last winter, there were five pediatric deaths associated with influenza.

Women in strained marriages are more likely than other wives to have high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease, researchers said today. Researchers at the University of Utah studied more than 300 couples who had been married for more than 20 years. Each couple answered questions about their relationship and mental state and took lab tests.