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The average life expectancy has decreased in 2017 in the United States compared to 2014, largely because of the opiate crisis, said Robert Anderson, head of mortality statistics at the National Center for Statistics of the United States. health, who published the figures.
Thus, if the average life expectancy was 78.9 years in 2014, it was 78.6 years in 2017 (76.1 years for women and 81.1 years for men). "It's the first time we've seen a downward trend since the big flu outbreak of 1918, which obviously had a bigger impact on that number," Anderson said.
With this average life expectancy, the United States is losing, for example, to Canada, where opiate use has also increased at an alarming rate. In a more subjective analysis of the numbers, Robert Redfield, director of the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lamented that "so many Americans are lost for reasons that could be avoided."
The often deadly consumption of opiates began to increase from 2000 and the trend has continued over the next few years. In 2017, about 70,000 Americans died from an overdose related to the use of these drugs, 10% more than in 2016.
Robert Anderson compares this drastic rise to the peak of the HIV epidemic of the last century, at least in terms of deaths. However, there is one difference: it has faded over the years, while the current one, which concerns overdoses, is becoming more and more acute. "We are a developed country, we did not assume that the average life expectancy decreases but rather increases."
Some of the overdose deaths were due to the use of non-opioid drugs, such as cocaine, methamphetamines and MDMA, a psychoactive substance, ecstasy (27,000 deaths), but most were due to the use of drugs. heroin, morphine or opiates. semi-synthetic drugs, such as oxycodone, an analgesic that began circulating in a hospital, and then was diverted to several parallel markets, and fentanyl, the most sought-after synthetic opioid and so much more powerful than heroin.
Access to such substances is easy and can be sent, for example, by mail, and there is no risk that the letter and its contents are intercepted, notes the French newspaper Le Monde. The number of deaths from synthetic opiates doubled from 2015 to 2016 and increased by 45% over the previous year.
Preliminary data for 2018 indicates that the crisis hit a new high earlier this year. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has already spoken about the subject, but Robert Anderson believes that it is "difficult to prove it", at least for the moment. Only the figures for the first quarter of this year are available, he said.
This decrease in average life expectancy associated with increased opioid use is not evenly distributed among US states. The most affected areas are the New England region where overdose deaths rival traffic-related deaths and provide more than a quarter of organ donations, and states of the United States. old American industrial belt, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, and especially West Virginia. Some rural phenomena in the center of the country, such as Texas and South Dakota, have remained intact.
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