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Life expectancy continued to decline in the United States in 2017 and has accumulated in recent years a historic deterioration due mainly to the drug overdose crisis according to published health statistics Thursday.
] " This is the first time we have seen a downward trend since the great flu epidemic of 1918" told AFP Robert Anderson, head of mortality statistics at National Center for Health Statistics. who divulges the data. Anderson nonetheless pointed out that the decline was much stronger in 1918.
In 2017, life expectancy at birth was 76.1 years for men and 81.1 years for women. The average population was 78.6 years, compared with 78.9 in 2014.
In addition, is three and a half years less than in Canada . On the other side of the border. and this is also affected by overdoses.
"These statistics alert us and show that we are losing many Americans very quickly for preventable reasons" said the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. diseases (CDC), Robert Redfield.
In 2017, about 70,000 Americans died of overdoses, 10% more than in 2016.
In terms of deaths, Anderson compared this situation to the rise of the HIV epidemic . but with one difference: that it decreases rapidly . The statistician expects overdoses to follow the same path. "We are a developed country, the life expectancy must increase and not decrease" he said.
Of the 35 OECD countries, only Iceland has recently experienced a decrease in life expectancy, according to figures until 2016. In the rest of the places, it has increased or stagnated.
Suicides also increased in 2017 in the United States.
Opiates
There are two categories of overdoses. On the one hand, non-opioid drugs, such as cocaine, methamphetamine and other psychostimulants: for which about 27,000 people died.
But this increase is largely due to the second category:
This includes heroin, morphine, and semi-synthetic opiates, such as oxycodone, a prescription pain reliever sold on the market. black, with the help of doctors and complicit laboratories who claim to ignore the problem and which usually Lately, the majority of deaths are due to a new generation of drugs: synthetic opiates, such as fentanyl, dozens of times more powerful than heroin, with which the slightest error of dose can be fatal.
He killed the singer Prince. And it was used for the execution of a convict in August in Nebraska.
The death rate due to synthetic opiates doubled from 2015 to 2016. It increased by 45% last year.
But the figures for 2017 reveal a detail that gives hope for relative hope: the number of overdoses continues to increase, but at a slower pace.
Preliminary data for 2018, even suggest that the crisis reached its peak early in the year. "But that's hard to say" because he only has data for a few months now, said Robert Anderson, a cautious man.
In Staten Island, New York, Dr Harshal Kirane, director of the Addiction Service, avoids jumping to conclusions. "It is encouraging to see that the trajectory is curved, no doubt," he told AFP. "But 70,000 dead, it is still difficult to digest."
Not all countries are equally affected by this scourge. Central states, from Texas to South Dakota, are relatively safe.
The crisis is acute in New England, in the northeastern corner, where overdose deaths provide more than a quarter of organ donations, competing with road accidents.
He is very strong in two states of the old industrial belt (Ohio and Pennsylvania) and particularly in the very poor West Virginia, which stands at the front with the sad figure of 58 deaths for each 100,000 inhabitants, compared with a national average of 22.
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