According to a review of statistics published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the death rate for white men and women ages 45 to 54 has climbed steadily between 1999 and 2014.
This is significant. For a majority of other sections of the population, incidents of death are going down. Or, as The Washington Post put it: “An increase in the mortality rate for any large demographic group in an advanced nation has been virtually unheard of in recent decades.” The one exception, the Post noted, is Russian men after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Among middle-aged white Americans, it’s a specific subgroup pushing the mortality rate up: those with no more than a high school education. Among this group, deaths per 100,000 spiked by 134 between 1999 and 2014. Death rates for white people with a college degree were quite low, the study noted. African-Americans still have a higher death rate than whites — even those in the 45 to 54 age group — but their mortality rate has decreased over time.
It’s hard to overstate how alarming scientists find this jump in the mortality rate.
“Half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” said Angus Deaton, an economics professor at Princeton, who co-authored the report with his wife, Anne Case. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”
“Wow,” Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, told The New York Times. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”
The U.S. government, according to the authors of the study, are not shining a light on this alarming trend. “White Americans who are middle-aged were really doing worse,” Anne Case said. “And that’s not the news we were hearing.”
With reporting from The Associated Press.
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