Poor & uninsured residents of Texas-Mexico border have longer average life span than most in country

Children walk across a railroad bridge in Rio Grande City, Starr County,Texas, along the border with Mexico. Few of its residents have full health or dental insurance and many of them must travel across the border to Mexico to buy medicine. Yet the mortality rate is 77 -- almost on par with the national average.(Getty Images-FoxNewsLatino)

An article appearing on Fox News Latino is reporting that border residents, on the average, have a longer lief-span than those people in other parts of Texas and the United States as a whole. FoxNewsLatino reports:

Many residents who live along the Texas/Mexican border are poor, lack health insurance and have high dropout rates – yet they live longer than many other people in Texas – and the country, a new study shows.

A Texas study by the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation examined the state county-by-county. The study, first reported by The Texas Tribune, showed that the lowest mortality rates tended to be along the border with Mexico.

In two Texas counties, Hidalgo and Cameron, the average life span was 80 – two years longer than the country’s life expectancy rate.The Texas Tribune says a diet rich in low-fat Mexican food, physically demanding jobs, and health care received across the border in Mexico could be the reason for longer life expectancy rates. Though it also questioned the validity of the numbers, considering how transient the border towns are in Southern Texas.