PUBLISHED 5/20/08 ------

Living in Kern County can be hazardous to your health. That’s one way to look at the findings in a new report on public health from the Great Valley Center.

Central Valley residents don’t have the doctors and medical specialists, per capita, found elsewhere in California, and they are more likely to die of diabetes and heart attacks. They suffer more often from assorted poverty- and pollution-related illnesses than the rest of the state, and are immunized from illness and disease less often. And Kern County is among the worst of the worst in several areas.

Researchers used about two dozen health care indicators, including health insurance coverage, childhood asthma rates and birth weight data to arrive at the conclusions in “The State of the Great Central Valley: Public Health and Access to Care.”

Among the findings:
Kern is third-worst in the 19-county Central Valley in infant mortality rate, with 7.1 deaths per 1,000 births, based on 2004 figures — and faring poorer in that area than three years earlier. It is tied for worst for low birth-weight babies, second-worst for flu-immunization rates, second-worst for chlamydia rates, and fourth-worst in childhood asthma rates.

Kern is worst among the San Joaquin Valley’s eight counties in three-year cancer dearth rates, and dead last — by a shockingly wide margin— in age-adjusted death rates for coronary heart disease.

The study links those health statistics to high rates of poverty, tendency to smoke and binge drinking as compared to the rest of the state.

It’s not all bad news.

Some valleywide trends, such as smoking, immunizations and heart disease are slightly improved from past years. But virtually all lag behind other regions of the state.

What can we do about it? David Hosley, president of the Great Valley Center, said the findings should make Central Valley residents more cognizant of lifestyle choices and how they can impact health.

“People in the Central Valley are making unhealthy choices,” Hosley told the Sacramento Bee. “We’re not eating well, we don’t get enough exercise, we are choosing to use alcohol or drugs to excess.”

But laying the problem at the feet of individuals fails to take broader issues into account. Local governments must work harder to create access to open space, build walkable neighborhoods and retail areas, and reject development plans that fail to account for those and other considerations, such as public transportation.

Healthy living affects almost everything: workplace productivity, success in school, health-care rates, and the ability of a city to attract productive new residents.

With the Central Valley population forecast set at 131 percent growth over the next 40 years, the time to enact positive changes — some of them quite difficult — is upon us.