Over the past 18 years the life expectancy for white women who didn’t finish high school has dropped precipitously. Today, those women can expect to die five years earlier than their counterparts a generation ago. It’s one of the biggest magnitude losses in life expectancy ever recorded, and nobody knows what’s causing it. At the American Prospect, Monica Potts reports on scientists efforts to untangle the knot of correlations at the heart of this public health mystery and tells the story of one woman, Crystal Wilson, whose life and death mirrors the statistics.