A recent study showed that the life expectancy of the average
American male increased 2.1 years from 1999 to 2009, to just
over 76 years of age. However, that wasn’t the case in Boone
County, West Virginia, were the average life span for men
actually declined in the past 10 years. Boone County men saw
their life expectancy drop to 69.7 years old, which was a
decline of one percent over the past decade. The counties with
the biggest declines are largely in coal producing counties in
Appalachia. Twenty-nine of these 50 counties were in Kentucky,
Tennessee, Virginia or West Virginia. Six were in Oklahoma and
four were in Georgia, according to the study. Even before 1999,
men in these counties lived shorter lives than the national
average of 76.2 years. In the last decade, however, in these
counties men’s already-short lives grew shorter. The Institute
for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of
Washington compiled the data for the study. Those counties where
men’s lives are growing shorter in rural Am