Question

The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is the world's largest ongoing telephone survey system. It is a serial survey that has tracked health condidtions and risk behaviors in the United States each year since 1984. According to this survey, the percentage of Americans who considered thrir health as excellent was 24.7 in 1995 but 20.0 in 2008. The annual decrease in the percentage was 1.6. Why does the health of Americans appear to be declining?

Answer 1

Answer:

The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance system is the nation's premier system of health related telephone surveys that collect state data about U.S. residents regarding their health related risk behaviors, chronic health conditions, and use of preventive services.

Established in 1984 with 15 states, BRFSS now collects data in all 50 states as well as the district of columbia and three U.S. territories. BRFSS completes more than 4,00,000 adult interviews each year, making it the largest continuously conducted health survey system in the world.

Americans lead shorter and less healthy lives than people in other high income countries. Review the evidence and explanations for these variations in longevity and health, overview suggests that the US health disadvantage applies to multiple mortality and morbidity outcomes. The american health disadvantage begins at birth and extends across the life course, and it is particularly marked for american women and for regions in the US south and Midwest.

America's obesity epidemic is shortening the lives of Americans and burdening them with a range of chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease, hypertension and certain cancers. Obesity is also a risk factor for the onset of depression, while depression, in turn, contributes to the onset of obesity.

The decline in America's health has been described in the public health literature for decades and has long been hypothesized to be attributable of psychosocial problems that are not specific to white.

U.S. health disadvantages:

• Medical care and public health system.
• Individual behaviors.
• Social and demographic explanation.
• The built physical environment.
• Upstream policies.
• Childcare and early childhood education policies.
• Education policies.
• labour & employment protection policies.
• Income support policies.
• Housing policies.
• Tax policies, redistribution and income inequality.

At last i can say that however, the relative increase in various measures of despair recorded in the sociological literature and the relative decline in health and well being in the public health literature also preceded it seems that the epidemic is sitting on top of a much longer, and more poorly understood, decline in well being in the united states.