About the tool
With this interactive map, you can explore health trends in the United States at the county level for both sexes in
- Alcohol use (new to this visualization)
- Smoking prevalence
- Life expectancy (updated with 2013 data)
- Hypertension
- Obesity
- Physical activity
- Poverty
Interact with the data visualization
Data Downloads
Click the here to download estimates for alcohol use, life expectancy, obesity, and physical activity. Downloads for smoking and obesity are availbable from the Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx). Please see the links under Related Content > Related GHDx Records at the bottom of this page.
Note: Poverty Data
The poverty data are from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program at the Census Bureau.
Definitions of the three alcohol drinking types:
- Any drinking: consumed 1 or more alcoholic beverages in the past month
- Binge drinking: consumed 4 or more drinks in one sitting (women) or 5 or more drinks in one sitting (men) on at least one occasion in the past month
- Heavy drinking: consumed, on average, more than 1 drink per day (women) or 2 drinks per day (men) over the course of the past month
The five metrics based on these types are:
- Any drinking: age-adjusted prevalence of any drinking among adults age 21 and older
- Binge drinking: age-adjusted prevalence of binge drinking among adults age 21 and older
- Heavy drinking: age-adjusted prevalence of heavy drinking among adults age 21 and older
- Binge drinking among drinkers: age-adjusted prevalence of binge drinkers among adults age 21 and older who do any drinking
- Heavy drinking among drinkers: age-adjusted prevalence of heavy drinkers among adults age 21 and older who do any drinking
Browser issues
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- Use Ctrl+0 to reset the browser zoom. Sometimes having the browser zoomed in or out interferes with the layout or a few mouse-dependent properties.
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Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). US Health Map. Seattle, WA: IHME, University of Washington, 2015. Available from http://vizhub.healthdata.org/us-health-map. (Accessed [INSERT DATE])
Related Content
Data visualizations
Overweight and Obesity Viz
This interactive data visualization tool shows estimated trends in obesity and overweight prevalence worldwide and by country for the years 1980 to 2013.
News releases
Heavy drinking and binge drinking rise sharply in US counties
Today, Americans are more likely to be heavy drinkers and binge drinkers than in recent years due in large part to rising rates of drinking among women, according to a new analysis of county-level ...
The vast majority of American adults are overweight or obese, and weight is a growing problem among US children
An estimated 160 million Americans are either obese or overweight. Nearly three-quarters of American men and more than 60% of women are obese or overweight. These are also major challenges for Amer...
Obesity continues to rise in nearly all counties but Americans becoming more physically active, too
The rise in physical activity levels will have a positive health impact on Americans by reducing death and chronic disability from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. But the trend has had little...
Girls born in 2009 will live shorter lives than their mothers in hundreds of US counties
Lifespan gap between counties grows; life expectancies for black Americans improve greatly.
Americans gaining more weight than they say
IHME study identifies discrepancies between national surveys tracking obesity; women appear to be more attuned to weight changes than men.
Huge disparities in hypertension seen across US counties
One in five Americans is completely unaware that he or she is at risk for the second leading cause of premature death: high blood pressure. In the first ever analysis of awareness, treatme...Dietary risks are leading cause of disease burden in the US and contributed to more health loss in 2010 than smoking, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar
In nearly every major cause of premature death – from ischemic heart disease to diabetes to interpersonal violence – the United States trails its economic peers, according to new research from ...
Small number of counties lead the way in reducing smoking rates in the US
Nationally, smoking rates have decreased since 1996, but the declines have been driven by a relatively small share of counties across the US, according to new re...Publications
Drinking patterns in US counties from 2002 to 2012
We estimated the prevalence of any drinking and binge drinking from 2002 to 2012 and heavy drinking from 2005 to 2012 in every US county.
Global, regional, and national prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adults during 1980–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013
In 2010, overweight and obesity were estimated to cause 3.4 million deaths, 3.9% of years of life lost, and 3.8% of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) worldwide. We estimate the global, regiona...