What Kills Americans & Where

FiveThirtyEight has updated its U.S. mortality rates map to cover more categories of disease and causes of death. The 35 Years of American Death map shows the mortality rates in each county for the leading causes of death in the United States. The new causes of death added to the map include nine categories of chronic respiratory disease, four categories of infectious disease, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, self-harm, interpersonal violence, alcohol use and drug use.

FiveThirtyEight's map shows that there are some geographical trends in the mortality rates associated with many causes of death. In fact we don't even to have to look at individual causes of death to see that many counties in rural Appalachia have very high mortality rates. If you want to know why the mortality rate is so high in these counties then look at the cancer and substance abuse mortality rates in these counties.

In More Americans Are Dying From Suicide, Drug Use And Diarrhea FiveThirtyEight uses the data from its map to visualize some of the changes in mortality rates for a number of diseases between 1980 and 2014. These maps show the counties in the USA where the visualized diseases have grown or fallen significantly over the last 30 years.