When
unemployment is high, there is more penetrating trauma (bullets,
knives). When employment is high, there is more blunt trauma
(automobile crashes).
href="http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Health/2007/08/09/unemployment_predicts_hospital_trauma/5157/">Unemployment
predicts hospital trauma
Published: Aug. 9, 2007 at 9:48 PM
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 9 (UPI) -- A University of Tennessee study found a
link between unemployment rates and a type of trauma seen in hospital
emergency rooms in pre-Katrina New Orleans.
Atul Madan of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and
colleagues examined unemployment rates in New Orleans from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, and the registry of trauma emergency room
admissions from January 1994 and November 1999 at the Medical Center of
Louisiana at New Orleans -- known as Charity Hospital.
The study, published in Springer's World Journal of Surgery, found the
higher the unemployment rate, the higher the number of admissions for
penetrating trauma -- injuries by an object piercing the skin such as
bullets and knives.
However, the lower the unemployment rates, the higher the number of
admissions for blunt trauma -- the majority of them the result of motor
vehicle collisions.
Madan said a possible explanation for the finding could be that with
higher employment and higher incomes, more travel is likely, resulting
in more accidents.
I suppose Emergency Departments can expect to see more penetrating
trauma in the coming months.
Incidentally,
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/341/25/1892">unemployment
is also a huge risk factor for domestic violence.
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...and in other breaking news, when people have less money thet buy more lottery tickets, eat more junk food, smoke more, take more marijuana, eat more anti-depressants, develop schizophrenia more often and are more likely to kill themselves.
What could it possibly mean?
Actually there are good physiological reasons for those behaviors.
It takes a certain continuous supply of food to ovulate, maintain a pregnancy, birth an infant, nurse the infant, wean the infant and support the child until the child becomes self-sustaining in food. If there is a break in that chain, the child dies. The only way for the woman or couple to then successfully reproduce is to start over.
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2007/08/low-nitric-oxide-acute-psychosis…
If unemployment triggers the feeling that a pregnancy and child is unsustainable, the correct "evolutionary" response is to not get pregnant, to terminate any pregnancy, or to break the chain as early as possible, to get an earlier start on a potentially successful chain.
Domestic violence may be an evolved "feature" that does that when times are hard. A brutally hard "feature" so that desperate people can do the desperate things they need to do to reproduce successfully.