University of Wisconsin | Trouble in God's Country

Nov 4

Georgia blacks make strong gains in premature death rates; rural white females losing ground

As we’ve noted in various previous posts, Georgia’s premature death rate (known formally as Years of Potential Life Lost before age 75, or YPLL 75) has been improving fairly steadily over the 20 years that the state’s Department of Public Health (DPH) has been compiling pertinent data.[1] Between 1994 and 2013, the state’s YPLL 75 rate improved from 9,195.6 to 7,104.7, a gain of 19.4 percent. The national median, as reported the Robert W. Johnson Foundation in its latest County Health Rankings, was 7,681, so Georgia is doing a little better than the nation as a whole.

But, as we’ve noted in past posts, Georgia’s improvement has been far from even; we’ve focused in particular on regional differences and the dramatic gap in YPLL 75 performance between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state. Until now, however, we haven’t looked at racial or gender comparisons, and that produces a couple of interesting headlines. One is that the vast majority of gains in premature death rates between 1994 and 2013 have been made in the black population. The other is that rural white females are losing ground. Read more

Mar 26

Forsyth County moves to the top of the 2015 TIGC Power Ratings

With the publication Wednesday of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2015 County Health Rankings, we can indeed report that, as expected, Forsyth County has slipped past perennial leader Oconee County and claimed 1st place in the 2015 Trouble in God’s Country Power Ratings. Read more

Mar 26

Thanks, New York Times!

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a presentation I’ll be delivering next month to the Kentucky Public Health Association. I was invited to speak to the group after one of its leaders saw me deliver an early version of the “Connecting the Dots: Community Health & Economic Vitality” presentation we developed as part of the Partner Up! for Public Health campaign that officially concluded last year.

It was literally yesterday afternoon that I finished double-checking data and proofing maps I’ll be using to demonstrate the overlap between good health and strong economies in the Bluegrass State – and this morning The New York Times gave me a major assist by publishing a front-page story built around a first-ever look at county-level smoking rates.

Annual Power Ratings stable at the top, volatile at the bottom

Now that we’ve published the Partner Up! for Public Health campaign’s 2013 Community Health & Economic Vitality Power Ratings, we’ve begun to dig into the barrels full of data that underlie those rankings. What we’re looking for is interesting or useful nuggets of information that help inform the discussion about the relationship between health and the economy at the local level.

Sometimes you spot patterns or trend lines that seem interesting, but it’s not always easy to interpret the data or explain what – if anything – it might mean. That’s the case with today’s topic. Read more

Feb 12

The Two Georgias of Health: From Minnesota to Mississippi

For at least 30 years now, editorial writers, politicians and civic leaders have been wringing their hands about the “two Georgias” problem. The term was reportedly coined by the late Albany, Ga., media magnate James Gray in 1983 to frame a discussion about economic disparities between north and south Georgia. Generations of leaders have since regularly invoked it as a lament about the state’s seeming inability to bridge myriad gaps among various parts of the state.

The discussions almost always center on economic development and prosperity in different parts of the state and then bridge to other issues, including education and transportation. Health status and healthcare sometimes make it onto the agenda, but usually as a footnote or an afterthought.

YPLL: A Primer

Today’s subject is YPLL. YPLL is the acronym for Years of Potential Life Lost, which is probably the most common way of gauging premature death and is more or less the Dow Jones Industrial Average of public health. If you want a quick, one-number look at the health status of a county or state or nation, you look at YPLL and whether it’s getting better or worse.

Basically, YPLL is calculated by taking the number of people who die in a community in a given year and subtracting their ages at death from 75, which is the most commonly used projected “end point age.” I’m 64. If I die this year, I’ll contribute 11 years to Fulton County’s bucket of Years of Potential Life Lost. An infant who dies at the age of six months would contribute 74.5 years to that same YPLL bucket. Read more

Aug 1

A look at obesity in the different parts of Georgia

August 1, 2012

Today, we’ll take a look at some fresh work we’re doing on obesity in Georgia. Obesity itself isn’t necessarily a medical condition, but it often contributes to diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and some types of cancer – all of which obviously are serious medical conditions and very expensive to treat.

It’s not news, of course, that Georgia has an obesity problem. According to United Health Foundation’s 2011 edition of America’s Health Rankings, 30.4 percent of adult Georgians are obese and we rank 38^th out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Another non-profit that tracks health status, the Trust for America’s Health, says we’re doing a little better. In the 2011 edition of its “F as in Fat” report, TAH puts the adult obesity rate in Georgia at 28.1 percent. It also uses a worst-to-best ranking system that puts us in 17^th place nationally; on the best-to-worst scale used by America’s Health Rankings, we’d be 34^th. Read more

Connecting the Dots: Health, Education, Economics and Politics in Rural Georgia.

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