Global Pulse Blog

I recently read a very interesting article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which spoke about the correlation between education and health.   The article, ‘Social Policy as Health Policy’, (subscription needed) by Steven Woolf, MD, MPH stated that increasing education levels would do more to improve life expectancy in the US (and, presumably, across the globe) than advances in medical interventions.  One website referenced by the article is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Education and Health Calculator.  This tool will allow you go see the percent of adults who hold a university degree in every state of the US, or by many counties, to see the mortality rates, and to see how those rates would be affected by higher levels of education.  It’s fun to look at, and an important reminder that health inequalities can begin with inequalities in education.