WASHINGTON
Where you live, combined with race and income, plays a huge role in whether you die young, says a study issued last week that contends the differences are so stark it’s as if there are eight separate Americas instead of one.
Worse, the gaps in lifespan have persisted over 20 years, despite efforts to tackle them, concluded Dr. Christopher Murray of the Harvard University School of Public Health.
“That’s pretty devastating,” says Murray, who published the exhaustive analysis in the online science journal PLoS Medicine. “Whatever it is that we’re doing isn’t working. That’s a wakeup call.”
Leading the nation in longevity are Asian-American women who live in Bergen County, N.J., and typically reach their 91st birthdays, concluded Murray’s county-by-county analysis.
On the opposite extreme are American Indian men in swaths of South Dakota, who die around 58.
Millions of the worst-off Americans have life expectancies typical of developing countries, says Murray. Asian-American women can expect to live 13 years longer than low-income Black women in the rural South. That’s like comparing women in wealthy Japan to those in poverty-ridden Nicaragua.
