What is life expectancy in your zip code?

lifee-expectancy

Courtesy Kansas City Health Department.

Poverty contributes to bad health and early death, the city health director reported this week, and there is no cure for that.

In Kansas City, “the bad news is we still have a long way to go before we get to health equity,” director Rex Archer reported Tuesday to the mayor and city manager.

Life expectancy varies from 81-to-83 years in zip codes with median family incomes of $92,258 to 70-to-72 years in codes where the median family income is $27,899.

Courtesy Kansas City Health Department.

Courtesy Kansas City Health Department.

Health experts are now studying how “adverse childhood events” make it harder for people to graduate from high school, he said.

And for the 25-to-34 age group, people who did not graduate from high school are 17 times more likely to die than people who got a college degree.

More needs to be done to work on health equity and on issues like smoking and healthy eating, he said, but the city and state have limited resources, very limited.

Missouri ranks absolutely last among the states on money spent for public health, Archer said.

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