Health
Eight Southern states have obesity rates over 30% of the population, the highest in the country: Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Rates for hypertension and diabetes for these states are also the highest in the nation. A study reported that six Southern states have the worse incidence of sleep disturbances in the nation, attributing the disturbances to high rates of obesity and smoking. Life expectancy is lower and death rates higher in the South than in the other regions of the country for all racial groups
The South also has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, with states like Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas having rates exceeding 60 per 1,000 teens.
The 2011 American State Litter Scorecard reports that hundreds each year are killed by vehicle collisions with unremoved debris along public roadways. Approximately half of the nation's total deaths by these accidents occur within the combined states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. The Scorecard also noted the South has the most number of WORST states having unclean public spaces and poorest citizen environmental health practices.
Read more about this topic: Southern United States
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented with fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere.—Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Youth no less becomes
The light and careless livery that it wears
Than settled age his sables and his weeds,
Importing health and graveness.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)