An intriguing infographic has come to light which highlights some damning truths about Union County, Florida.
The infographic has been pieced together by YourLawyer.com, who have taken into account all of the cancer cases in the United States and put them together in a league table format. The full results can be seen here:
Using the CDC as their main data source, YourLawyer.com found that for every 100,000 people who lived in Union County, an average of 1,135 would suffer from cancer. In comparison to the next lowly county, in the form of Logan County, this was almost double the rate.
While the statistics are quite frankly shocking, they also should not be surprising. Several years ago, the county was classed as the least healthy in the United States. In other words, this isn’t a small problem like having insufficient thermometers – it’s been a long-winded issue that doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
It is only when one starts to dive deeper into the statistics that even more seems to become clear. Union County ranks the worst in the country for lung cancer and leukemia. However, it doesn’t breach the bottom ten for non-Hodgkin lymphoma or colon and rectum cancers, which the infographic also tracks. Nevertheless, with almost 195 people per 100,000 suffering from lung cancer, and almost 35 with leukemia, the numbers are frightening.
To provide something of a comparison, the infographic has also looked at some of the better performing counties in the United States. The difference is stark and if we turn to Ziebach County, in South Dakota, this has just 130 cancer diagnoses per 1,000 people. This isn’t a statistical outlier either, with the second placed county Aleutians East Borough having just 194 diagnoses.
The plot thickens when the infographic proceeds to look into specific types of cancer again. For example, in the case of lung cancer, McKinley County has a rate of 12.7 diagnoses per 100,000. Again, the difference with Union County is staggering.
Finally, let’s look at the data from a state-level. While Union County has perhaps drawn unwanted attention on Florida, its Kentucky which receives the brunt-end of the statistics overall. Six out of the worst counties for cancer are in Kentucky and when the data is broken down again, lung cancer seems to be the main cause.
There are all sorts of avenues to dig into the data, so we will leave you to decipher the full infographic for now.
