The US National Academy of Sciences reports on US health in a global perspective and the news is bad. Citizens of peer nations live longer than Americans do, and the difference is growing, especially for women. The report notes nine health domains where the US falls short. I’m going to highlight two domains that are critical to child health: Injuries and Homicides and Adolescent pregnancy. These two domains are connected in a distressing way.
It interests me that Italy shows up as so low on the chart above. It makes me think that the biggest problem is alcoholism. The rate of alcoholism is very low in Italy. Interestingly Japan has one of the lowest overall rates of crime in the world where Italy is close to the middle of the pack of developed countries in crime but the rate of Maltreatment death is more than double in Japan what it is in Italy (at least on that chart).
(Here is a great post by Tyler Cowen on the subject of alcohol. ) So the question is what can we do to reduce the overuse of alcohol. It is important that we diagnose the problem correctly. I wonder if we have good studies on the relationship of alcohol use to abuse.
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