OBJECTIVES This report details the National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) development of the 2006 NCHS Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties and provides some examples of how the scheme can be used to describe differences in health measures by urbanization level. METHODS The 2006 NCHS urban-rural classification scheme classifies all U.S. counties and county-equivalents into si...

This paper examines the spatial distribution of jobs across U.S. counties between 1970 and 2000, and investigates whether sectoral employment is becoming more or less concentrated. The existing literature has found deconcentration (convergence) of employment across urban areas. Cities only cover a small part of the U.S. though. Using county data, our results indicate that deconcentration is lim...

Background & Aims of the Study:  Collection and transportation of municipal solid waste (MSW) for various reasons, especially economic and social are considered as one of the most important elements of the solid waste management system. More than sixty percent of the costs in solid waste management systems in different countries are due to the collection and transportation...

BACKGROUND Adapting to extreme heat is becoming more critical as our climate changes. Previous research reveals that very few communities in the United States have programs to sufficiently prevent health problems during hot weather. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to examine county-level local heat preparedness and response in 30 U.S. states following the unusually hot summer of 2011. METHODS Using ...

The relationship between the availability of lethal methods of injury and suicide rates is an important, but unresolved question. We investigated this relationship by prospectively classifying lethal methods according to their accessibility in the five counties of New York City. These counties have both similarities and differences in the proportion of their populations with access to specific ...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Many US cities have experienced population reductions, often blamed on crime and interpersonal injury. Yet the overall injury risk in urban areas compared with suburban and rural areas has not been fully described. We begin to investigate this evidence gap by looking specifically at injury-related mortality risk, determining the risk of all injury death across the rural-urban c...

With the passage of Amendments 20 (2000) and 64 (2012), Colorado legalized the medicinal and recreational use of marijuana. Nebraskan law enforcement in border counties subsequently reported increases in arrests and reductions in jail space. In response, the Nebraska state legislature passed LR-520 to study potential increased costs incurred by criminal justice agencies in border counties. To i...

The map illustrates the geographic variation across counties and shows that counties with the highest prevalence of Medicare beneficiaries with 6 or more chronic conditions are located predominantly in southern states (eg, Texas, Florida, Kentucky) and northeastern states (eg, New York, Pennsylvania). Counties with the lowest prevalence are found mostly in western states (eg, Oregon, Montana, W...

In this analysis, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data from 2000 were used to examine differences in reports of preventive health service utilization in 4 types of counties: large metropolitan counties, small metropolitan counties, counties adjacent to metropolitan places, and counties not adjacent to metropolitan areas or with fewer than 10,000 residents. Women from counties with 10,000 or fe...