An ancient sage wrote that “death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.”
In the United States, the CDC mortality database is the destiny of every man, woman and child, and journalists interested in health care should take this to heart.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compiles the comprehensive vital statistic on mortality – based on data collected by individual states – with information taken directly from a person’s death certificate as filled out by a doctor, medical examiner or coroner. It has catalogued individual deaths by year, location, age, ethnicity, cause of death and more since the 1950s.
For our story, we weren’t particularly interested in the leading causes of death – people die frequently from the same things no matter where they are the United States. And there are plenty of state and county reports that tally causes of death. We wanted to see were the causes of death in Nevada and Clark County, home to Las Vegas, were extremely high when compared to the national average. We write all the time about the unique ways people live in Sin City, and we were curious what the database would show about the way we die here in Las Vegas.