Nevada’s most distinctive cause of death linked to run-ins with the law

(Kristen DeSilva/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Nevada’s most distinctive cause of death — though not its most frequent — isn’t a disease.

It’s encounters with law enforcement, according to a new state-by-state report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Encounters with law enforcement in this case does not include executions.

The study maps out how geography factors into the prevalence of rare killers. For 22 states, the total number of these types of deaths was under 100.

The Silver State falls into that group, with deaths by so-called legal intervention at 82, a rate 2.8 times the national average, said Francis Boscoe of the New York State Cancer Registry and the lead researcher in the study.

Researchers couldn’t identify a clear reason why death by legal intervention garnered the most distinction in Nevada as well as New Mexico and Oregon.

The report is based on data from 2001 through 2010. The number of officer-involved shootings in Southern Nevada has decreased since then, after changes in policy and training with Las Vegas police.

Metro implemented changes suggested by federal officials after a 2011 series of Las Vegas Review-Journal articles examining officer-involved shootings.

A Metropolitan Police Department spokesman declined comment for this story but pointed to the 2012 creation of an Office of Internal Oversight, meant to review the agency’s use of deadly force.

Highlighting nonstandard causes of death between states can help guide education and training initiatives by public health officials.

“Although chronic disease prevention efforts should continue to emphasize the most common conditions, an outlier map such as this one should also be of interest to public health professionals,” the CDC report says.

Boscoe said Nevada also was more than double the national average in unknown medical causes, which served as Georgia’s distinction, and atherosclerosis, a disease in which plaque builds up inside arteries of the heart and other parts of the body. It can lead to heart attack, stroke and death.

Some of the findings in the CDC report make sense, such as influenza and lower lung infections being the rare causes of death most notable in some Northern states, black lung in the in coal-mining states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, and air and water accidents in Alaska and Idaho. Data from other states are less obvious, such as deaths from HIV in Florida to tuberculosis in Texas to syphilis in Louisiana.

The most distinctive cause of death is defined by location quotient, which is used in business to quantify how concentrated a particular industry, occupation or demographic group is compared to the national average. Location quotient can reveal what makes a state unique.

The report notes one limitation of the map in that it depicts only one distinctive cause of death for each state even though there were many others that also were significantly higher than the national rate. For that reason, the researchers said, the map would best be regarded as a snapshot, not a comprehensive statistical summary.

Contact Steven Moore at smoore@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4563.