When discussing probabilities, the two common measurement systems are ratios and percents. A ratio would be written as 1 chance in 3 or a probability of 1/3. The same number as a percent would round to 33% or possibly 33.3%, which as a fraction would be 33/100 or 33.3/100. Going past a tenth of a percent in rounding is rare.
When discussing death statistics, the usual time period is a year and the usual scale is per 100,000 population. The most likely causes of death for all adults are heart disease and cancer, both currently slightly under 200 deaths be 100,000 population in the United States, according to The New England Journal of Medicine.
Heart disease is dropping quickly as a cause of death. In 1960, it killed 369 of every 100,000 people, nearly twice the rate we see today. Cancer, on the other hand, is rising slowly. It went from 149 of 100,000 in 1960 to 186 of 100,000 in 2010. The general consensus is that we are seeing more cancer deaths because people are living longer and not dying of other diseases.
And then there is death by violence. In the general population, it is a much smaller risk than the major diseases. In 2010, accidents caused 38.2 deaths per 100,000 population, making it the fifth most common killer. The only other death by violence in the top ten these days is suicide at 12.2 per 100,000. The murder rate is much lower.
I show a picture of a gun here because of the noticeable dichotomy in suicide rates between men and women. Women's suicide rate is less than 5 per 100,000 while men's rates about 19 per 100,000. That would seem to say men are about four times more likely to kill themselves than women are, but that is not the entire picture. When looking at reported suicide attempts, women try to kill themselves at a rate three times greater than men's. Multiplying three by four, this means a man attempting suicide is twelve times more likely to succeed than a woman.
Men attempting suicide are much more likely to use a gun than women are. For all the fear we have of mass killers, the biggest public safety problem concerning guns happens alone behind closed doors.
I apologize here midway through this post for morbidness, but it is about to get worse. Now we look at infant mortality, babies born alive but not surviving to a first birthday. Instead of being counting on the scale of 100,000, infant mortality is counted per 1,000 live births.
In 1960, infant mortality was much worse than it is today, even in industrialized nations. The United States was losing 26 of every 1,000 babies, which would round 2.6% By reports I have seen, it was significantly worse in 1956, the year infant mortality mattered to me personally, though I was blissfully unaware.
Unaware, but not untouched. When I was a baby, I contracted bronchialitis, an inflammation of the small blood vessels in the lung. There have been attempts to find a cure, but now as then, for the most part this is a watch and wait situation. I was fed through a tube in my heel and - spoiler alert - I survived. The scar, once very noticeable, is now high up on my ankle.
This graph shows six countries arbitrarily chosen from among the industrialized world: France, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Even in 1960, we were not "number one", as we so often have been taught to think of ourselves. Now we are in sixth place out of these six.
This is not random chance. Every country we think of as being "advanced" or "industrialized" does a better job of keeping babies alive. The countries we compete with are like Croatia and other Eastern European still trying to catch up after decades of living under backward Communist rule. (Notice that the countries ahead of us all practice what is called socialism by American standards.)
Infant mortality is a difficult and complex subject. It is getting better, even in the worst places, but even in the best places that are around 2 per 1,000 live births lost, that would multiply out to 200 per 100,000. it's as bad as heart disease is for the general population.
Infant mortality is not part of the general conversation in this country. It should be and it should not be a cause of conflict culture, one political side against another. We have the means to do better. We only need to add the political will.
No comments:
Post a Comment