Everyone knows that cancer and heart disease is prevalent everywhere, but what strange illness affects your state more than others?
It doesn’t matter where you live: cancer and heart disease are two of the most feared illnesses in the land. But they’re not the only ones, and a team of researchers recently went through data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to find out which causes of death tended to be more common in one part of the country than others — and it led to some pretty crazy findings.
The researchers, led by Francis Boscoe and other scientists at the New York State Cancer Registry, wanted to create a map that showed just how diverse the United States can be when it comes to ailments or other causes of death, and while they didn’t provide any explanation as to why the results were as they were, some of them seemed pretty obvious, according to a Live Science report. You can take a look at the map by clicking here.
For example, not surprisingly flu was a prevalent illness in northern states like North Dakota where there’s plenty of cold, and plane and boat accidents happened in outdoorsy states like Idaho and Alaska. And in mining states like Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia, lung disease was a distinctive cause.
There there’s New Mexico, Nevada, and Oregon where for some reason, “legal intervention” was considered a distinctive cause — that means police officers. In New Jersey, sepsis was a leading cause of death.
Researchers made their determination of a “most distinctive cause of death” in a state by looking at 113 causes of death and calculating the rate of death compared to the nationwide rate. In Alaska, for example, people were about seven times more like to die of a plane or boat accident than the rest of the U.S.