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:
“I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“To get time for civic work, for exercise, for neighborhood projects, reading or meditation, or just plain time to themselves, mothers need to hold out against the fairly recent but surprisingly entrenched myth that “good mothers” are constantly with their children. They will have to speak out at last about the demoralizing effect of spending day after day with small children, no matter how much they love them.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“A major difference between witches and psychotherapists is that witches see the mental health of women as having important political consequences.”
—Naomi R. Goldenberg (b. 1947)