Knology: Homicide drops off US list of top causes of death
ATLANTA (AP) — For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation's top 15 causes of death, bumped by a lung illness that often develops in elderly people who have choked on their food. ...
The CDC's latest annual report on deaths contained several nuggets of good news:
—The infant mortality rate dropped to an all-time low of 6.14 deaths per 1,000 births in 2010. It was 6.39 the year before.
—U.S. life expectancy for a child born in 2010 was about 78 years and 8 months, up about a little more than one month from life expectancy for 2009.
—Heart disease and cancer remain the top killers, accounting for nearly half the nation's more than 2.4 million deaths in 2010. But the death rates from them continued to decline.
— Death rates for five other leading causes of death also dropped in 2010, including stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents, flu/pneumonia and blood infections.
But death rates increased for Alzheimer's disease, which is the nation's sixth-leading killer, kidney disease (No. 8), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (No. 12), Parkinson's disease (No. 14) and pneumonitis.
The report is drawn from a review of at least 98 percent of the death certificates filed in the U.S. in 2010.
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