Trending
Young people are America's future, so the old saying goes.
However, they cannot be America's future if they are dead.
"Young Americans are dying at alarming rates" was a headline in the May 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal, below which was the message, "Four main causes pushed up mortality, reversing years of declines."
Judging from the Journal's research and reporting, new and more intensive school- and community-based strategies to effectively tackle the problem should, without question, be considered mandatory. Meanwhile, parental involvement in implementing those strategies should be regarded as mandatory, too.
The need for a full understanding of the problem at hand cannot be overemphasized.
"For decades, advances in healthcare and safety steadily drove down death rates among American children," the Journal's report began. "In an alarming reversal, rates have now risen to the highest level in nearly 15 years, driven by homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides," the report said.
Consider this: An analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, found that between 2019 and 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7% -- and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year.
According to Woolf's analysis, that's the highest increase for two consecutive years in the half-century that the government has publicly tracked such figures.
The Journal's report said based on global death counts provided by Christopher J. L. Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, "other developed countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Norway also saw a rise in some death counts among young people."
It apparently has yet to be ascertained where the six-county Southern Alleghenies region has "contributed" most to the overall, deeply troubling U.S. youth-death-rate numbers, but scanning newspapers' obituary pages, including the Mirror's, makes some ponder that question -- and worry about whether any effective solutions to the problems are available and within reach.
The Journal report pointed out increases in suicides and homicides among young people went largely unnoticed at first because overall child and adolescent mortality rates still declined most years.
Now it is recognized that the U.S. is the only place among peer nations where firearms are the leading cause of death in young people. Meanwhile, suicides among the young, particularly those between 10 and 19 years old, began to increase in 2007, while homicide rates for that age group began an upturn six years later.
Antibiotics development and safer automobiles and bicycles helped to reduce young-people deaths in the years following World War II, and other medical advancements, including those since then aimed at fighting childhood cancers, have produced the same result.
"All of those gains are now being offset by essentially four causes of death," Virginia Commonwealth University's Woolf said, referring to homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides.
How do you make inroads against large, complex problems such as those? Until those new tactics are generated and geared up, many more children seem destined to die, children once regarded as America's future.
What a tragic prospect.