Trego's Mountain Ear

The Center for Disease Control has a lot of data available – though you have to get through their screens and promise not to use it in ways in which they might not approve. Personally, most of my research, like theirs, was government funded – and I believe that if the taxpayers paid to get the data, it rightly belongs to the people.

You can get an idea of how easy the data is to get and use by clicking on wonder.cdc.gov/natality.html#share-nav It leads to data on live births in the United States – and, as a demographer, my three topics were births, deaths and migration.

https://wonder.cdc.gov/ is the big, inclusive site to get at CDC data on births, deaths and environment.  So far as the environment goes, I can easily sort out that Lincoln County had 175 heat wave days between 1981 and 2010 – which is nice data, but doesn’t necessarily tell me much.  On the other hand, if I switch to death counts, I can find that the peak age for dying in Lincoln County is from 75 to 79 – a bothering statistic to a man who just turned 75. On the other hand, Lincoln County had 3,937 deaths between 1999 and 2016 – again, the data may, or may not be particularly useful.  On the other hand, neoplasms caused 996 of those deaths – which is the sort of detail that some might find useful.

I’ve used CDC data to get more insight into suicides, infant mortality, accidental deaths – a whole lot of areas where the data is relevant – so I really think sharing the access is kind of a mitzvah.

Editor’s Note: For the curious, a neoplasm is a fancy term meaning “tumor”, and which doesn’t distinguish between benign and malignant forms. While the rate of cancerous vs benign tumors varies by type and size, it’s probably fair to assume that most of the ones killing people are cancerous. So, that’s 996 deaths that were mostly cancer. Might be interesting to know how many of those were mesothelioma….