Search data on 35 Years Of American Death Mortality rates for leading causes of death in every U.S. county from 1980 to 2014. “Researchers have long argued that where we live can help predict how we die. But how much our location affects our health is harder to say, because death certificates, the primary source for mortality data, are not always complete. They frequently contain what public health experts call “garbage codes”: vague or generic causes of death that are listed when the specific cause is unknown. Garbage codes make it difficult to track the toll of a disease over time or to look for geographical patterns in how people die. The data shown in the map above represents one research group’s effort to fill in these gaps. See our related article on patterns of death in the U.S. Black Belt. That group — the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — designed a statistical model that uses demographic and epidemiological data to assign more specific causes of death to the records containing garbage codes in the National Vital Statistics System, which gathers death records (and other information such as births) from state and local jurisdictions into a national database. The institute also age-standardized the data so that places with larger populations of older people, who die at higher rates, do not have inflated numbers. The result is a set of more complete estimates of mortality across the country, one revealing regional and local variations in causes of death…”