Make New England your home and you'll generally enjoy a safer, healthier and more livable environment, compared to the rest of the nation, according to the latest national state-of-the-states survey.

New England is tops when it comes to livability and healthy living. New England states also joined the Dakotas as the safest states in the nation.

Meanwhile, southern states crowded the bottom of the rankings when it came to livability and health and southern states joined a couple from the west, as the most dangerous in the land, according to Morgan Quitno Press, a Lawrence, KS publisher that has been reporting on the best and worst of cities and states since 1989.

Livability

New Hampshire barely dethroned Minnesota as the nation's Most Livable State, ending the Land of 1,000 Lakes' seven-year streak at the top of the heap.

"New Hampshire slipped past Minnesota by the smallest of margins to earn this prestigious honor," said Scott Morgan, President of Morgan Quitno Press.

"The competition was fierce. Both states did well in nearly every category considered for the award. Our award is unique because it does not focus on any one category of data," he added.

To determine a state's livability, Morgan Quitno examined, for each state, 44 factors (25 negative, 19 positive), including everything from crime rates, costs of living, incomes and home ownership rates to low birth weight births, per capita number of books in libraries, sunny days and hazardous waste sites. Other factors included poverty rates, highway fatalities, home ownership rates, and education, among a host of others.

After New Hampshire and Minnesota, at the top of the list were, Vermont, Iowa and New Jersey.

Dead last for the sixth consecutive year was Mississippi, followed by Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee.

Health

New Hampshire's top-notch livability status stems, in part, from that fact that it is also the nation's Healthiest State, according to Morgan Quitno's rankings.

Again beating a perennial winner, which had the top health spot for the three previous years, New Hampshire pushed ahead of Vermont, followed by by Hawaii, Iowa and Minnesota.

The healthy living award is based on an analysis of 21 factors (3 positive, 18 negative) including access to health care providers, health care affordability, infant mortality rates, teen birth rates, binge drinking rates, sexually transmitted disease rates, hospital beds, suicide, car safety belt use and others.

Mississippi also finished at the bottom in this category for the fifth consecutive year, followed by the other least healthy-living states, New Mexico, Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina.

"New Hampshire has the nation's lowest teen birth rate, the lowest infant mortality rate, one of the highest childhood immunization rates in the country -- an impressive health care record," said Morgan.

Crime

When Morgan Quitno ranked the states based on how each compared with the national average in six crime categories -- murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft -- North Dakota, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and South Dakota, in that order, were the safest states in the nation.

The Most Dangerous states were Nevada, Louisiana, Arizona, Maryland and South Carolina.

"As the nation's fastest growing state, Nevada struggles with crime and other problems that accompany rapid growth. The state's violent crime rate jumped 8.2 percent from 2001 to 2002, while the rate for a nation as a whole dropped 2 percent" Morgan said.

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