Tag Archives: USA

Widening life expectancy gap between Republican and Democrat states of the USA

Posted on December 31, 2022 by colinmathers

In my previous post, I highlighted the 3-year drop in US life expectancy from 2019 to 2021. It contrasts with European and other high-income countries where the availability of vaccines and continued implementation of other public health measures resulted in … Continue reading →

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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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Abortion restrictions and maternal mortality

Posted on May 20, 2022 by colinmathers

In my previous post, I estimated that 47% of pregnancies are unintended, and of these, 43% occur in countries where abortion is illegal or severely restricted. Globally, 60% of unintended pregnancies are aborted.  In countries where abortion is widely available, … Continue reading →

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Global estimates of abortion rates by legality and region

Posted on May 16, 2022 by colinmathers

A little under two months ago, the Guttmacher Institute and WHO released first-ever country-level estimates of unintended pregnancy and abortion (see here). The new study analyzed data for 150 countries for the period 2015-2019 and found that: Almost half of … Continue reading →

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Afghanistan, where the war on drugs and the war on terror meet

Posted on September 7, 2021 by colinmathers

In the last couple of weeks, watching the end of the American war in Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover, I realized that Afghanistan is at the intersection of the war on terror and the war on drugs. I have been … Continue reading →

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Age Patterns of Religiosity and Atheism in the USA, Europe and Australia

Posted on May 29, 2021 by colinmathers

It is well known that the proportion of people who are atheist or non-religious in high income countries is generally higher in younger people than older people and rising over time.  So is the decline in religiosity mainly a cohort … 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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The second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic

Posted on August 28, 2020 by colinmathers

Today, I took another look at the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic using data on confirmed cases downloaded from the Johns Hopkins University CCSE data repository. This post focuses mostly on western European countries, with a few others like … 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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