A startling new study that shows a big spike in the death rate for a large group of middle-aged whites in the United States was rejected by two prestigious medical journals, the study’s co-author, Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, said Tuesday.
Deaton and Anne Case, both Princeton economists, received international media attention for the paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But before they submitted it there, they tried to get it published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Deaton said.
“We got it back almost instantaneously. It was almost like the e-mail had bounced. We got it back within hours,” said Deaton, who was interviewed in Dublin, where he was attending a conference on the Ebola crisis and global public health sponsored by Princeton University.
Deaton and Case then tried the New England Journal of Medicine, putting their work in the form of a two-page “Perspective” that summarized the alarming trend they’d discovered in government mortality statistics. Again they were rejected.
Deaton said the journal noted that their work does not explain why the historically anomalous surge in mortality occurred.
He compared the response to calling the fire department to report that your house is on fire: “And they say, ‘Well, what caused the fire?’ and you say, ‘I don’t know,’ and they say, ‘Well, we can’t send the fire brigade until you tell us what caused the fire.’ ” ...
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