CDC Demographic Statistics for U.S. Provide Evidence of a Collapsing Nation

Nov. 27, 2019 (EIRNS)—The National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published their findings for the U.S. in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The statistics are devastating confirmation of the continued rapid decline of the American population’s health and wellbeing.

• The birth rate in 2018 again declined, by 2% over 2017, the lowest rate in over three decades.

• The fertility rate, the number of children on average per woman, fell to 1.729, whereas 2.1 is considered the “replacement” rate.

• Middle-aged Americans are dying from preventable diseases at increasing rates, and they “tend to be clustered in the nation’s Rust Belt, where economies once boomed with a thriving steel industry, but have been in decline since the 1970s,” wrote NBC, in its coverage of the report yesterday. “That’s when the U.S. began losing pace with other countries,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, lead author of the new CDC report and the director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University.” He observed: “This is a distinctly American phenomenon.”

• Overdose death rates rose from 2.3 deaths per 100,000 people in that age group in 1999, to 23.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a ten-fold increase.

• “Life expectancy in America increased steadily from the late 1950s through 2014, when it peaked at 78.9 years. It then declined for the next three years, falling to 78.6 years in 2017. Researchers attribute that downturn to a growing number of people dying well before they should, between the ages of 25 and 64,” reported NBC.

• Although the major cause of these deaths is “drug overdoses, particularly opioids, alcohol and suicides,” but there are also increases in diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure, reflecting the lack of adequate income and health care.

• The most affected areas are the Ohio Valley (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Kentucky) and New England. The study authors say that the economic downturns that began in those states during the 1970s and the 1980s fueled chronic stress among their citizens, and are now manifested in growing midlife death rates. “If you’re trying to make ends meet, you’re less likely to go to the doctor. You may not do a good job taking care of your diabetes or heart disease,” Woolf said. “Also, you may be more likely to adopt unhealthy coping behaviors. You may turn to drugs as access to opioids becomes more prevalent as it did in the 1990s.”

• The trends were noted across all races and ethnicities, “including African American populations that have experienced disproportionately high death rates relative to whites for generations.”