[nugget]

I’m pretty sure the opioid epidemic is the leading cause of death in the US. Enormous numbers of Americans are dying from fentanyl and other poisons, but the media doesn’t like to cover it and the Government doesn’t like to talk about it.

[prawn]

I have no sense of its general coverage in the zeitgeist, but this month the White House announced Overdose Awareness Week "to focus the nation’s attention on the devastation caused by illicit fentanyl and other drugs" and also announced funding for a variety of things to attempt addressing it. Their recap links to media coverage in a variety of sources.

Of course, people and front pages quickly tire of 'boring' things like that and unfortunately get more excited about other events prone to popping up in a large country.

[robotresearcher]

Among young people it is currently guns, until recently was cars, and drugs is about half of either, but rising. Drugs has recently risen to be about the same as cancer.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761#:~:text=T....

[nradov]

A lot has changed since 2016.

"Poisoning was the leading cause of preventable death for all ages, combined, for the ninth consecutive year and was the leading cause of preventable death for every age from 22 to 68. This is largely due to the opioid epidemic affecting millions of people in the United States."

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/deaths-by-demograph...

[robotresearcher]

The data I used was up to 2020 (see the chart) and your link says that for people under 22 the leading cause was vehicle accidents in 2021.

But your point is made: drug poisonings are now the scourge of adults in the main years of life.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

The leading cause of death among young people is not guns. It's not even firearm-related injury, which is what your link talks about. The thing at the link (it's not a study) you point to has gotten a lot of press. It is deliberately deceptive.

It uses an age range of 1-19, excluding children 0-1 years old and including adults who are in their 18th and 19th years. So sure, when you do this bullshit maybe you can produce the answer your audience wants to see / which will play well in the press / which will lead to clicks. But it's not honest. The honest statistic for the U.S. is 0-18(exclusive) years old, and when you do the honest thing you see that death by firearm-related injury is not the leading cause of death for minors in the U.S.

The deliberately deceptive statistic is driven by including as many 15-35 year old males as possible. This is the age range when males in gangs are extra killy.

[refurb]

I find it curious that the age cut off for that study was under 20 years of age.

Why not 18 or under? That's what we've typically used as the cutoff between childhood and adulthood.

I think I know why.

[robotresearcher]

They are comparing with a paper from four years earlier that used that age range.

If your implication of some skulduggery is about guns, the previous paper showed vehicle accidents as the leading cause.

[refurb]

The earlier paper they cite has the same authors.

The point stands, why are they using 20 years old as a cut off for adulthood, when generally it’s 18 and below?

And interesting she published a paper in 2010 that had a cutoff of 18.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20370746/

I can tell you why - the data looks significantly different and tells a different story than the authors want to tell.

[robotresearcher]

If understand you correctly, you are unhappy to see attention drawn to the number of gun related deaths among young people.

Why hint rather than say what you mean?

[refurb]

No, you don't understand correctly.

I'm unhappy with a doctor playing games with statistics by manipulating the data, under the guise of actual science, in order to advance a political agenda.

Everyone should be unhappy with that.

But interesting you didn't comment on the other statements in my reply.

[tialaramex]

The US has significantly higher rate of car fatalities than peer nations, which you're correct in this case shadows its (far more significantly higher than peer nations) rate of gun deaths.

[tpolzer]

Over all age groups? Definitely not, cardiovascular diseases and cancer get ~everybody in the end: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...

You're right for 15-49 year olds, where drug overdoses only recently (around 2015) overtook cancer: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/causes-of-death-in-15-49-...