Tag Archives: drug overdose

Huge drop in US life expectancy in 2020 and 2021

Posted on December 6, 2022 by colinmathers

US life expectancy dropped nearly 3 years during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. The CDC has recently released US life expectancy estimates for 2021, finding a significant drop for the second year in a row. That decline … Continue reading →

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Excess mortality in the USA and its causes 2000 – 2020

Posted on May 14, 2021 by colinmathers

Sam Preston and Yana Vierboom published a short paper in April which showed that Americans die at higher rates than Europeans and this translated into roughly 400,000 additional deaths in 2017 that would not have occurred if the USA had … Continue reading →

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Global deaths attributable to drugs, alcohol and tobacco

Posted on February 20, 2021 by colinmathers

In an earlier post, I presented estimates of drug overdose deaths in 2019 for the world and selected countries. The USA accounted for an astonishing 40% of global drug overdose deaths and an even higher percentage of global opioid overdose … Continue reading →

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Drug overdose deaths – another exceptional US epidemic

Posted on July 18, 2020 by colinmathers

Earlier this week, CDC released provisional figures for drug overdose deaths in the USA in 2019. They estimate almost 72,000 deaths, the highest annual number yet seen. Initially driven by prescription opioid painkillers, users migrated first to heroin and then … Continue reading →

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