WASHINGTON — Sioux County, N.D., is the least-healthy place in the United States for the second consecutive year, while Los Alamos County, N.M., is the healthiest, according to a study.
Colorado’s Douglas County was the second-healthiest place, followed by Leelanau County in northern Michigan.
Sioux County, headquarters of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, which covers about 1 million acres in North Dakota and South Dakota, has the highest rate of premature deaths in the nation, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found. The county loses almost 24 years of potential life per 100 residents, compared to less than three years lost per 100 in Los Alamos, home to Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Eight of the 10 least-healthy counties are home to large populations of American Indians in the Dakotas, Alaska and Montana, according to the U.S. census. Counties with the highest rates of premature death tend to have high poverty rates, poor education systems and low levels of economic development, said Patrick Remington, professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, who compiled the data.
“We almost have a blind spot to the fact that we have counties, that represent all or part of Indian nations, that are some of the least-healthy places certainly in each state and nationwide,” Remington said. “To me, that should be sort of a national disgrace.”
Poverty is strongly associated with poor health and short life spans, Remington said.
Only 2.4 percent of families in Los Alamos live in poverty, and median household income is about $104,000, the census says.
Indians on reservations are in poor health because of “a whole host of reasons,” said Donna Galbreath, a member of the Ahtna Athabascan tribe, family physician at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage and president of the Association of American Indian Physicians.
“It comes from marginalization early on, it comes from substance abuse, it comes from lack of health care and underfunded health care,” she said.
