Heart disease and cancer are the most common causes of death in the United States, but not the only causes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has created a color-coded map and article on the "most distinctive" — meaning significantly higher than the national rate — cause of death in each state, 2001-2010.
Georgia's most distinctive cause of death is, literally, unknown.
"Maps of the most distinctive or characteristic value of some variable at the state or country level became popular on social media in 2014," the authors wrote.
"One of those popular maps showed the most distinctive causes of death in each state, but focused only on the top 10 causes. So the authors of the CDC-published paper decided to do one better," according to the Washington Post.
"The resulting map depicts a variety of distinctive causes of death based on a wide range of number of deaths, from 15,000 deaths from HIV in Florida to 679 deaths from tuberculosis in Texas to 22 deaths from syphilis in Louisiana," the CDC authors wrote.
Some of the distinctive causes of death are expected. In Maine, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming, for example, it's influenza.
In Georgia, however, it's "symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified."
In other words, "unknown medical reason."
"These unknown categories, which show up in many states (Georgia’s being the broadest such category), can be evidence of medical examiners being too careful (that is, not being willing to assign a classification unless there is indisputable evidence) or not careful enough," said Francis P. Boscoe, Ph.D, a research scientist at New York State Cancer Registry and an author of the report.
"In Georgia, the age-adjusted rate of 'symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified' is 25.7 per 100,000; in the country it is 11.4 – so a bit more than double," Boscoe said.
So, even though heart disease and cancer are more common, "unknown medical reason" is more distinctive in Georgia.
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