Counties get wellness rankings
Report examines death rates, pollution across state
SEATTLE – A report released Wednesday on wellness in nearly all the nation’s counties says San Juan County is Washington’s healthiest.
The director of San Juan County’s Department of Health and Community Services credited the healthy lifestyle of county residents as one reason for the ranking. But John Manning also acknowledged the self-selected nature of the community’s 16,000 citizens.
“Folks with chronic diseases who need regular medical care tend to move off the island,” Manning said. He said county residents also tend to have higher-than-average incomes and higher-than-average educations, which are both associated with better health.
The rankings were based on data from vital statistics and government health surveys.
Some of the factors the report looked at include premature deaths, low-birth-weight babies, obesity, unemployment, high school graduation rates and pollution.
The second annual report from the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation compared counties within each state.
San Juan County’s small population also helped its rankings for this report, because in some categories the numbers were too small to be statistically significant, and in other cases the numbers just weren’t available for researchers to look at.
Air pollution numbers showed San Juan has more “particulate matter days” than the Washington average, which Manning found hard to believe.
“Everybody I know who comes here says how nice and fresh the air is,” he said.
The report finds the least healthy of Washington’s 39 counties to be another small one, Ferry County, in part for some of the same reasons San Juan County is considered the healthiest: Ferry County in rural northeastern Washington is very small – about 7,500 residents – so some of the statistics seem more dramatic; its education levels are lower than San Juan County but not dramatically so.
Ferry County does have a higher poverty rate – 32 percent of children live in poverty – and a higher unemployment rate – 12.7 percent – than the state average. The county has a higher-than-average rate of premature death, which is defined as people dying before age 75 of preventable diseases. It also has a higher-than-average motor vehicle crash death rate and many fewer doctors than other places in Washington. Most of its other county health statistics are similar to rest of the state.
Ferry’s surrounding rural counties – Okanogan, Stevens and Pend Oreille – also fell near the bottom of the health rankings. The counties just to Ferry’s south did about 10 places better in the rankings.