282 - The Crisis of Declining Life Expectancy in the US—Before, During, and After COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2021
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Life expectancy in the US has been declining over the last 30 years, especially among working-age adults—a stark contrast from wealthy peer countries in Europe and Asia where adults are living longer, healthier lives. Hopkins health economist Dr. Darrell Gaskin talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about new data on this American crisis including a confluence of factors including a lack of jobs, systemic racism, and the greater availability of opioids. They also talk about how the crisis has been exacerbated by the pandemic, and about where to look for solutions to address a problem that "is not going away."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:38.8 | at jh.edu. |
| 0:40.5 | That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.6 | Today, I speak to Professor Daryl Gaskin, a health economist at Johns Hopkins, about life expectancy |
| 0:53.9 | in the United States, before, during, and after the pandemic. |
| 0:59.9 | Let's listen. |
| 1:01.5 | Professor Gaskin, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 1:04.9 | You were part of a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that just wrote a report called high and rising mortality rates |
| 1:15.3 | among working age adults. |
| 1:18.6 | What problem was this report describing? |
| 1:23.5 | Well, it's a real crisis in America. |
| 1:28.5 | Over the last 30 years, our mortality rates have been rising relative to our peer countries, meaning so if you sort of look at a trend of life expectancy for our country relative to our European peers in Japan. |
| 1:47.0 | You'll see that from, say, the 50s to the 70s and 80s, we were sort of tracking along with them. |
| 1:55.0 | And then after that, as we get into the 90s, we really start to slow down and they continue to continue to |
| 2:02.9 | rise. And now we're here in 2020 where we're actually seeing declines in life expectancy. |
| 2:10.6 | And so something is happening in the United States that's not happening in the rest of the |
| 2:15.5 | world. |
... |
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