The Violence Epidemic in Two Charts

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations has a handy data visualization tool here on worldwide causes of death and disability. The Venezuela pages are somewhat startling.

One key measure is Years of Life Lost: a statistical measure of the years of life a person would have been expected to live had they not died prematurely.

In IHME’s tool, the Y-Axis shows thousands of Years of Life Lost produced by deaths of people from a given age group, shown along the X-Axis. It takes a bit of looking, but the chart makes a bit of sense.

Here is the Years of Life Lost chart for Venezuela in 1995:

1995

The peach-colored strip on top represents Years of Life Lost, by age group, from “intentional injuries” (read: homicide and suicide).

Now, here’s the same chart for 2010.

2010

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