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HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS
AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
DECEMBER 20, 2013
Just one domino never falls...
W
ere you surprised to read the local high school graduation statistics in The Augusta Chronicle last week? If you missed the report based on data from the Georgia Department of Education, the figures are shocking: only 58 percent of Richmond County high school students graduate; only 76 percent do so in Columbia County. (Georgia’s statewide average is 71.5%.) The figures range from 100 percent for both A. R. Johnson and John S. Davidson magnet schools to 38 percent for Butler. What does this have to do with a newspaper whose focus is health and wellness? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, here are some established facts about the link between health and education:
• People with more education are less likely to die from the most common acute and chronic diseases (heart condition, stroke hypertension, cholesterol, emphysema, diabetes, asthma
less likely to have anxiety or depression. • Better educated people report spending fewer days in bed or not at work because of disease. • Think jail or prison is a healthy place to live? According to the Center for Labor Market Studies, the risk of incarceration (jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers) for male dropouts is significant. In 2007, male dropouts (aged 16-24) were 63 times more likely to be institutionalized compared to those with a bachelors degree or higher. Compared to high school graduates, the figure is a tenth of that: 6.3 times more likely to be institutionalized. • The Wall Street Journal says high school dropouts make up 75 percent of state prison inmates across the country.
attacks, ulcer). • More educated people are less likely to have hypertension, emphysema or diabetes, let alone die from it. • Better educated people are Please see GRADUATION page 10
Which one of these doesn’t match the others?
Answer, page 7
by Ross Everett
GET YOUR KIDS VACCINATED!
I
lliteracy is, perhaps, the only acceptable reason for parents not to get their eligible children their recommended vaccinations. The month before last, I wrote about Andrew Wakefield and the controversial—and downright fraudulent—beginnings of the notion that vaccinations cause autism in children. In the article, I highlighted how there have never been any major studies that demonstrate any such correlation. However, in science and medicine, there has to be some benefit, too, to defend a massive population health campaign such as public vaccination. The data has been Of course, not all vaccinations there the whole time, of course, but a involve a needle. new study published last month by the University of Pittsburgh, may have just made things too easy. The research, collected under Project Tycho, involved a massive data mining effort, compiling case reports—over 88 million individual ones— for contagious diseases in the United States that stretch back all the way to 1888. The most recent report from the project was published in The New England Journal of Medicine just last month. The reports included covered 56 different contagious diseases. However, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, and hepatitis A were the main contagions focused on. The findings were extraordinary. According to their data and models, since 1924 childhood vaccination programs have prevented over 100 million cases of these contagious diseases in the United States. The researchers opted to exclude any projections for fatalities. However, one of the leading researchers, Dr. Donald Burke, dean of the school of public health at the University of Pittsburgh, feels like that number likely approaches 4 million. Yet despite the data, resistance is growing. The amount of unvaccinated children is increasing throughout the United States, primarily the result of parents’ ability to gain nonmedical exemptions for their kids. And we are paying for it. Please see WIDE-EYED page 3