Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, put the sales pressure on doctors who already wrote more opioid prescriptions. That steered the pill away from black, rural counties and toward regions with greater numbers of whites. A noticeably lower overdose rate across the rural Deep South may be one result. Rural […]
Read More
A new interactive map shows the county-by-county impact of opioid drug overdoses. A researcher describes some of the challenges of reporting overdoses in rural areas and what researchers did to address them. If you’ve got a couple minutes, Michael Meit has a favor to ask. He’ll try not to take up […]
Read More
As the politicians frequently point out, the rural population has a greater percentage of veterans than the urban population does. But that’s not true for younger veterans It’s not news that rural America accounts for a disproportionately high percentage of U.S. veterans. But for younger veterans, the trend has reversed. […]
Read More
With the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the news because of proposed cuts, we took another look at the data. The bottom line: Rural areas cluster near the top of counties that are most reliant on SNAP. Rural counties and small metropolitan areas crowd the top of the list of […]
Read More
Since the Great Recession of 2008, rural employment is down 4% using the latest annual reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hardest hit are counties where mining (including oil and natural gas production) predominates. Though still in the negative, manufacturing counties are closer to pre-recession levels than other nonmetro […]
Read More
Nonmetropolitan counties saw an increase in population over the last year — the first such gain since 2011. The increase was slight and confined to rural counties that are closest to cities, according to a report from the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy. Rural American counties reversed a six-year […]
Read More