Longevity and Mortality: Utah's Ethnic Breakdown

I recently was appointed by Governor Herbert to serve on the Multicultural Commission.  The commission serves as a sounding board for Utah's ethnic communities and addresses issues that are unique to the diverse communities that are found in the state.

My first meeting was held a couple weeks ago  and I was very impressed with the quality of the presentations and the data shared.

One of the points of interest was a distinction made about life expectancy in relation to location.  Zip codes in Salt Lake County were analyized for average life expectancy.  Here are the results:

I thought this was fascinating.  WHERE you live can be correlated to HOW LONG you live.  Of course, we didn't delve into the causes of this in our meeting; but, this information does foster discussion.  It appears that the poorest areas of the county also have the lowest life expectancies and vice versa.

One of the points that we didn't discuss was fertility.  I would wager that the lowest life expectancy areas also have the highest fertility rates.  It would be ironic, but not necessarily surprising.  We'll see.

Another issue we discussed was health disparity or in other words the differences in health and demographics between ethnic groups.  Here is a .pdf of the presentation we heard on this issue:


MCC Data Presentation July 2012
The information is very insightful.  Further discussion needs to be had on root causes and the impact that education can make in helping some of these groups improve their health and well being.