For Issues of Health, Mind Where You Live

In a current essay published for the Association of American Geographers, several Mississippi State University research scientists issue a wake-up call about American health. Where you live can be a life and death matter.

In an ongoing project by the university's Social Science Research Center, team members are using the tools of spatial analysis—that is, an examination of "place" —to provide a map that traces the nation's health over time.

Using county-level Centers for Disease Control data on death rates and mapping it with geographic information systems technology, the team has determined that healthy and unhealthy places "persist over decades," said geographer and lead author Ronald E. Cossman.

The research report appears in "WorldMinds: Geographical Perspectives on 100 Problems," which was issued by Kluwer Academic Publishers (New York and other worldwide locations) as the commemorative publication of the AAG's centennial anniversary.

Collaborating on the article with Cossman were MSU sociologists Jeralynn S. Cossman, Troy C. Blanchard, Wesley L. James, and Arthur G. Cosby.

The MSU report identifies six clusters of persistently high-mortality counties, including: —the Piedmont belt along the Southeast coastline, —Mississippi Delta, and —portions of Appalachia, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, South Dakota, and Northern Nevada.

"Most research about health has ignored the geographic perspective," said Ronald Cossman. "The place-based research we're doing could be used in the allocation of medical services, as well as targeting populations that are at special risk.

"A majority of the high mortality counties are in the region typically called 'South,'" he added.

Now in its 51st year of service, MSU's Social Science Research Center recently established the Rural Health, Safety and Security Institute to focus on issues of particular importance to Mississippi's small communities. Funding for the research on healthy and unhealthy places was provided by the Office of Rural Health Policy, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The project's next phase will try to answer the question "why" ?

"This research begins to chip away at the question, 'Is it the place or is it the people causing these clusters of high and low death rates?'" said medical sociologist Jeralynn Cossman, a sociology faculty member and Ronald's wife.

Cosby, longtime SSRC director, said geography provides a starting point in "seeing" clusters that cross state lines and in revealing previously hidden patterns.

"Our technique of combining different research methods and academic disciplines has been very successful," he explained. "By bringing together investigators from geography, sociology and demography, we were able to visualize medical data and identify those clusters." Other geography-related chapters in "WorldMinds" addressed the environment and politics; AIDS pandemic; urban transportation; "smart" growth; gender and globalization; tropical deforestation; dangerous environments; undocumented immigrants in the 21st century; and a host of other topics that "confront society and the environment."