Public Health Trivia - Ep 3

Learning about public health, one trivia question at a time until you have an MPH. 

Topic: US Mortality Statistics 

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Transcript

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Welcome to episode three of Public Health Trivia, a series where we learn about public health one trivia question at a time until you have an MPH. 12 questions. There will be a pause after each question before the answer. Today's category, US mortality statistics. It's a bit grim, but a big part of public health is preventing death, and therefore knowing death is an integral part of this process. Ready? Here we go. Question number one. Comparing the US with the European Union, the top two causes of death are the same. The two leading causes of death in both the US and the EU are these two categories of diseases respectively, and you must get two to get the point. Correct answer: Cardiovascular disease is number one, and cancer is number two leading cause of death in both the US and the EU. Question number two: where death statistics between the US and EU diverge is the third leading cause of death. This discrepancy may be interpreted as the effect of different culture but also different public health approaches in the two regions. In the US, the third leading cause of death is this, in contrast with the EU, which is respiratory diseases. Correct answer. In the US, the third leading cause of death is unintentional injuries or external causes. Things like car crashes, homicides, any sort of workplace accidents that result in fatality would fall under this bucket. There's many ways to interpret this. One could be that the US perhaps don't care about our injury rates as much as we should, but also Europe tend to smoke tobacco at much higher rates than the United States, so maybe that's why their third leading cause of death is respiratory diseases. It's a deep topic, and I encourage everyone to look into this. Anyway, moving on. Question number three, back to US mortality statistics. Of the 196,000 deaths from unintentional injury in the US in 2024, this many of them are from motor vehicle crashes. Give your answer in thousands. If you said anything between 40 to 44,000, you earn the point for this question. 42,000 out of 196,000 is around 21% or about a fifth, meaning that US car-dependent infrastructure is a major contributor to US mortality statistics. A lot of these motor vehicle crashes probably could have been prevented. Question number four. Another divergence of US mortality statistics can be seen when breaking things down by age group. For example, at every age, children in the US die at a higher rate than children in comparable countries. For children age 1 to 19, the leading cause of death of US children is this. Correct answer: 7 kids per day in 2023. On average, not literally. You earn this point if you said anything between 5 to 9 per day. Question number six. For children between the age of 0 and 1 years old in the United States, the leading cause of death is this? Correct answer is birth defects or congenital condition is the leading cause of death for children under one year old in the United States. And this I think is true for most countries in Europe as well. Question number seven. On the other side of things is maternal mortality, which is another thing that the US struggle with compared to PR countries. Our first multiple choice question: Do the majority of maternal deaths occur during pregnancy, during labor and delivery, or during the postpartum period. Correct answer. Most maternal death occurs after delivery is fully completed, during the postpartum period, what some people are calling the quote fourth trimester. Question number eight. Another way to parse mortality statistics is by gender. Looking at the leading cause of death in the US for men versus women reveals that men are much more likely to die from poisoning than women, mainly due to this. Correct answer? Poisoning is a big category that includes drug overdoses, whether it's drugs or alcohol, and men are more than twice as likely than women to die from overdoses and therefore more likely to die from poisoning than women. Question number nine. In the US, death from intentional self-harm or suicide ranked number 10 in the leading causes of death at around 49,000 people in 2024. In contrast, this many thousands of people in the US died by homicide in the same year. You earn this point if you said anything between 18,000 and 22,000. In other words, there is more than double the amount of suicides than there are homicides in the US on average in any given year. Question number 10. In 2024, the same year, this many people in the US died from COVID-19. Round your answers to the nearest thousand. Correct answer: around 47,000 people die from COVID in 2024. This means two times more people died from COVID than homicide in 2024. And I bring up these examples to sort of illustrate how oftentimes our perception of risk is not backed up by statistics. Obviously, there are a ton of other risk factors to consider, but in general, homicide is not as serious of a risk compared to things like COVID, the seasonal flu, or even suicide. Question number 11. Looking at geographic variation, this US state has the highest age-adjusted death rate per 100,000 in 2023. Correct answer is West Virginia. West Virginia has the highest age-adjusted death rate per 100,000 in 2023. A close second in Mississippi, and a very close third is Kentucky. Question number 12. This U.S. state has the highest suicide rate in 2024. Correct answer is Alaska. And that is all the questions for today. Tune in next time for more public health trivia. Next episode, I want to try something a little bit different, make it more current event and timely. We'll see how that goes. If you think there's an error in the episode, please don't hesitate to let me know by emailing me at everything is publichealth at gmail.com. Check out our website for all updates and bonus material. And remember, public health is for everyone.