The following article by Jennie Neufeld was posted on the AlterNet website August 8, 2017:
Infant mortality rates are rising, while life expectancies are plummeting.
First came deindustrialization and mass unemployment, then the opioid crisis. Now a new report from HealthAffairs reveals that infant mortality rates in Appalachia dwarf those in the rest of the country. Life expectancies are considerably shorter as well.
Looking at an array of data, the study finds that infant mortality was as much 16 percent higher in Appalachia, while life expectancies had dropped by as much as 2.4 years between 1990 and 2013. Poor black men from the region are expected to live 13 years less than white women from low-poverty areas elsewhere in the United States. Continue reading “Appalachians Are Harder Hit by Poverty Than All Other Americans—So Why Does Trump Want to Make Their Lives Worse?”