Poverty is the nation’s fourth leading cause of death, killing an estimated 183,000 Americans aged 15 and up in 2019, according to new findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Monday.
“Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the homicides in 2019. And yet, homicide firearms and suicide get vastly more attention,” said the study’s lead author David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside.
Poverty now falls just behind heart disease, cancer and smoking, earning it the “silent killer” moniker as such a statistic has historically been difficult to define.
While poverty — defined as earning less than 50% of the median US income — has generally been linked to a shorter life expectancy, this study is among the first to quantify the number of deaths directly attributable to poverty, which entails not only hunger and malnutrition but also a lack of access to doctors and life-saving medicine, as well as a greater likelihood of negative environmental factors and exposures that put stress on their health.
Read more at https://nypost.com/2023/04/17/silent-killer-ends-more-american-lives-than-obesity-drug-ods-new-data/
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