What's Killing White American Women?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2016
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The rich world has got used to health and longevity getting better, and death rates falling – for everyone. But over the past few years data has been accumulating which suggests that this trend has stopped for poorly educated, white Americans. And for one group in particular - middle-aged women – death rates are going up. It’s a shocking finding, meaning many will die at a younger age than their mothers. What’s happening? Certainly, life is tough for many low-income American families. “What the data look like,” says the economist Paul Krugman, “is a society gripped by despair, with a surge of unhealthy behaviours and an epidemic of drugs.” Is he right? Are the conditions of working class life in America killing white women?
Presenter: James Fletcher
(Image: A cemetery in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC World Service, this is James Fletcher with the Inquiry. |
| 0:07.0 | This week we're trying to solve a mystery. |
| 0:10.0 | It's a mystery found in data, and it's hard to communicate data on radio. |
| 0:14.7 | But here's our colleague Neil Rizel doing his best. |
| 0:17.8 | This is the sound of good news. |
| 0:24.0 | It's falling adult mortality rates from the World Health Organization. |
| 0:29.0 | Countries are presented as a series of three notes. |
| 0:32.0 | The first is from the year 1990, the second, |
| 0:36.2 | 2000, the third, 2013. High notes are high mortality, low ones are low. |
| 0:44.0 | China, India, Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia, even Somalia, and rich countries, Germany, Kuwait, Australia, and the US. |
| 1:07.0 | But researchers there found a remarkable exception. |
| 1:10.0 | Did you catch that? For one group of Americans mortality is rising. That group are |
| 1:20.9 | less educated white women. |
| 1:24.1 | And that's unprecedented. |
| 1:26.1 | Around the world, people are living longer than ever before, |
| 1:30.0 | but for this subset of the US population, death rates are rising. |
| 1:35.5 | This week our question is simple. Why? |
| 1:42.3 | Part one, a stunning reversal. |
| 1:47.0 | I think many of us have an assumption of inevitability in terms of mortality trends. |
| 1:58.0 | Things are supposed to be getting better. |
| 2:00.0 | Our first expert witness is Jennifer Karas Montez from Syracuse University in New York State. |
| 2:07.0 | She's been studying mortality for 10 years. |
... |
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