Overall, the health of the United States benefits from the fact that the U.S. is a rich nation by global standards. Life expectancy

Please do not let the overall numbers in life expectancy of our country fool you. The expectancy of life varies a great deal throughout different populations in the nation. Social epidemiology is the study of how health and disease are distributed throughout a society’s population. Two areas that we will focus on are gender and race. All of the areas showed an increase in life expectancy but some groups increased more than others. Throughout history men have had a lower life expectancy than women. In 1998 the life expectancy of males was 73.8 years and that of women was 79.5 years. One reason for this is that women are less likely than men do die from complications with the birth process. More importantly however, the big changes occur when socialization begins. Men develop personalities that are more individualistic and aggressive. These qualities lead to higher rates of violence, accidents and suicide. Men’s personalities result in higher amounts of stress, which wear on the body more. This leads to problems such as heart attacks earlier in life. Also, men have historically held more physically demanding jobs in society, which also takes more toll on the body. The life expectancy of women has increased at a more rapid pace than men throughout the century (59.4% in males and 64.6% in females from 1990 to 1998.) However, the pace of increase for men has surpassed that of women during the past decade. This is because the roles of men and women are becoming more similar. Another cause is that women are twenty times more likely to have an eating disorder than men. Anorexia nervosa, dieting to the point of starvation, and bulimia, induced vomiting to avoid weight gain, has had a growing negative effect on women in the United States.

The next area we will look at is race. The life expectancy of blacks was over six years less than that of whites in 1998. This large difference can be attributed to different factors related to economic standing. Poverty among African Americans is three times the poverty rate of whites. The rate of death among children under one year of age, infant mortality, is twice as high for disadvantaged children as it is for the

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