World Life Expectancy – Interesting Website Shared by My Friends at TC Pro-Net

The Thurston County Progressive Network are a great bunch of folks who work year-round to produce a more progressive community in the Olympia area. In this week’s calendar they share a link to World Life Expectancy website and a cancer cluster map.

It’s an interesting website from an epidemiology perspective. The suggestion in the cancer cluster webpage is that environmental degradation can be tracked to a certain extent by cancer rates. I think there are a lot of regional cultural issues, like diet, wealth/poverty that also contribute to the cancer clusters, but environmental degradation is probably part of the story. If you live in one of the black (high cancer rate incidence) counties, you can weigh in with why you think your county might have high cancer rates.

I am in Lewis County, WA. It’s a relatively low income per capita by WA standards, so we probably have a lower rate of preventive medical care, but we also have a couple of superfund cleanup sites, one for PCBs, and we have a coal mine (not operational today) and a coal-fired electricity plant, known locally as the Centralia Steam Plant. We try not to mention coal here on either shore of Coal Creek, but the steam plant and the steam mine have been a large part of Lewis County economy over the decades.

This website also has an informative interactive world life expectancy map that includes gender life expectancy. Pretty cool website. Lots of information.

oh, friendship is good for longevity, according to these folks. Sounds right to me.

Don’t miss this page if you are a budding epidemiologist.