Medicine and Man

I am not drawing any conclusions but interesting data nevertheless:

Sources:

The Examiner: High teen pregnancy rates/conservative religious states: New study results indicate correlation

Links to Data on Swivel:

Importance of Religion in One’s Life by State

Teen Birth Rates by State

Interesting find on Swivel:

There may be a silver lining in the cloud of recession. There’s evidence that life expectancy increases during times of high unemployment.

This data shows the relationship between unemployment and life expectancy for the USA between 1960 and 2006. The following series are shown:

• residual life expectancy – the difference between the actual and expected life expectancy, in lay-terms, how much longer people lived than they were expected to
• unemployment % – the unemployment rate for the year
  

Each series is normalized to show how many standard deviations it is away from the mean so that the scale is comparable across both series (necessary because Swivel does not yet support two-axis graphs).

This graph was inspired by

• Feeling Better Lately? in the Freaknomics Blog
• The effect of economic recession on population health
  

Source data came from the OECD. You can calculate the numbers for your own country using the data below.

• Unemployment figures
• Health & life expectancy figures

The increase in life expectancy could be explained by increased leisure time, healthier lifestyle and better eating habits.

(View Graph on website)