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:
“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“...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)
“All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)