Researchers have long argued that where we live can help predict how we die. But how much our location affects our health is harder to say, because death certificates, the primary source for mortality data, are not always complete. They frequently contain what public health experts call “garbage codes”: vague or generic causes of death that are listed when the specific cause is unknown. Garbage codes make it difficult to track the toll of a disease over time or to look for geographical patterns in how people die. The data shown in the map above represents one research group’s effort to fill in these gaps.
That group — the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — designed a statistical model that uses demographic and epidemiological data to assign more specific causes of death to the records containing garbage codes in the National Vital Statistics System, which gathers death records (and other information such as births) from state and local jurisdictions into a national database. The institute also age-standardized the data so that places with larger populations of older people, who die at higher rates, do not have inflated numbers. The result is a set of more complete estimates of mortality across the country, one revealing regional and local variations in causes of death. [...]
Still, some outliers are simply anomalies. The county with the highest overall estimated mortality rate in 2014 was Union County, Florida. Union stands out from its neighbors in North Florida for a particular reason: It’s home to the Union Correctional Institution and the Florida Department of Corrections Reception and Medical Center, which provides inpatient medical care for state prisoners across Florida. These prisoners artificially raise Union County’s mortality rate.1
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