Not that everything is peachy keen in Vermont, but relatively speaking, they aren’t that bad, either.

From the ever-useful Rural Blog comes word that reporter Bill Bishop of Daily Yonder has performed the valuable service of doing a county-by-county check of the recent growth of poverty in America.

It was disproportionately rural.

Using U.S. Census bureau statistics, Bishop found that while last year’s 13.2 percent nationwide poverty rate was the highest since 1997, it was higher yet – 16.3 percent – in the nation’s rural counties.

“The increase in the number of poor Americans was heavily weighted in rural communities,” Bishop wrote. “Rural counties were home to just over 16% of the nation’s population in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But 33% of the increase in the number of poor Americans from ’03 to ‘08 — more than one million people — was found in rural counties.

As a result, the gap between the poverty rates in urban and rural America widened, doubling between 2003 and 2008.”

During the 1990s, Bishop found, the rural-urban poverty gap actually declined, thanks largely to a growing nationwide economy. The weaker economy of this decade, though, apparently hits rural areas the hardest. There are 50 rural counties where more than 32 percent of the people live under the poverty line.

How many of those counties are in Vermont?

None. In fact, no Vermont county has a poverty rate as high as that 16.3 percent of all rural counties. Essex County in the Northeast Kingdom comes closest with a 14.8 percent poverty rate, closely followed by neighboring Orleans County, at 14.3 percent.

(In case anyone is wondering, Chittenden is Vermont’s only urban country. Franklin and Grand Isle are considered exurban. All the others are designated rural).

On the other hand, no Vermont County was among the least impoverished rural counties, either. And in all of them, the poverty rate was higher than it was in 2003, when the rate in Essex County was 12.3 percent, and 13.1 percent in Orleans.

Here are the poverty rates for the other counties: Addison—9.5 percent up from 8.7 percent in 2003; Bennington–12.2, up from 10; Caledonia–11.8 , up minimally from 11.3; Chittenden—9.6 from 7.6; Franklin—9.9 up from 9.5; Grand Isle—8.4, up from 7.3; Lamoille—10.1 from 8.8; Orange—10.9 from 9.2; Rutland—11.6, up from 10.3; Washington—9.7 up from 8.4; Windham—9.8, just up from 9.7; Windsor—9.3 up from 8.7.

It’s possible that Vermont’s rural counties are lucky in being, in a sense, less rural than the rural counties of many other states. Down South and especially out West, some rural counties take up as much space as four or five of Vermont’s, and are much farther from the nearest town of any size, where most of the good jobs are these days.

What with poverty going up, it’s no surprise that so is reliance on food stamps. Last Sunday’s New York Times reported that one in eight Americans – and one in four children – use food stamps to keep themselves nourished. So widespread is the use of food stamps, the Times reported, that much of the stigma is gone from a program “once scorned as a failed welfare scheme.”

Using both U.S. Agriculture Department and Census Bureau statistics, the Times also provided, on line, a county-by-county breakdown which showed that in Vermont, as in almost every other state, use of food stamps has grown everywhere, especially in some of the more affluent areas.

Chittenden County, for instance, had Vermont’s lowest percentage of food stamp users in June of this year – nine percent. But the growth since June of 2007 was 43 percent, higher than the 33 percent growth in less affluent Essex County, where 17 percent of the residents use food stamps.

The same pattern holds in many other states, at least suggesting that the current recession is plunging into poverty many households and individuals who until recently could be classified as middle-income. Not only are some of those people unemployed, but even more are working fewer hours.

Here are the results for the other Vermont counties, with the percentage on food stamps first, followed by the two-year percentage increase: Addison—9. 61; Bennington—16. 51; Caledonia—16. 41; Franklin—15. 46; Grand Isle—11.52; Lamoille—13. 47; Orange—12. 13; Orleans—20. 42; Rutland—15. 45; Washington—11. 45; Windham—15. 54; Windsor—11. 47

And speaking of statistics, and reluctant though the News Guy is to beat up on the Burlington Free Press yet again, there was a certain amount of innumeracy in its account last week of Fletcher Allen Health Care’s dissent from the recent federal task force recommendation that all women under 50 did not need to get annual mammograms.

“During the last fiscal year,” the paper reported, “the hospital screened about 7,000 women ages 40 to 49…79 women in that age group were diagnosed with cancer.”

But “those diagnoses were not necessarily made through the annual screening process.”

Meaning those figures provide no evidence of the efficacy of the annual mammograms for those women. Neither does the fact that women in their forties “had the second largest tally of breast cancer diagnoses,” after women in their fifties.

They would, wouldn’t they? The disease is less prevalent among both younger and older women.

Reached in Chicago, where she is attending a medical conference, Dr. Sally Herschorn, Fletcher Allen’s attending radiologist, acknowledged that the figures were “not germane” to the factual debate over the recommendations. But Dr. Herschorn said she thought the task force’s study was “flawed,” and that annual screenings by women in their forties could save lives.

She may be right. But the numbers cited by the Freep as evidence for her position, while interesting, were not evidence for anything.