Top Causes of Death

[Kondoru]

Just a little something I found....


The top 10 killer diseases in the “whole world”
1 Heart disease, and not just in the "developed world"
2 Strokes,
3 Lower respiratory infections (pneumonia)
4 HIV/AIDS,
5 child birth associated conditions
6 Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
7 Diarrhoea,
8 Tuberculosis
9 Malaria,
10 Road traffic accidents.
May 27, 2006 The Lancet.
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[Semyaz]

Tuberculosis, really??

Even including the whole world death toll population, I thought (or maybe assumed) that the inocculation/ cure thing had wiped it out except in the most severe of areas...

...hence, my surprise that its in the top 10... :?

 

[escargot]

Nope. TB is not only still present, being a disease of poverty, it is on the increase, with new, extra-virulent strains appearing in the last 20 years or so.

 

[Anonymous]

Minister plays down cattle TB fears

The government is playing down reports that an outbreak of tuberculosis in cattle in north Wales could be worse than the foot-and-mouth epidemic.
A Welsh vet had warned of a "serious" situation developing in Denbigh.

But animal health minister Elliot Morley said the comments by North Wales Divisional Veterinary Manager David Pugh were misleading.

He added that TB in cattle was confined to a small percentage of the UK national herd.

Cattle cull

Ten beef cattle at a farm near Denbigh - an area previously clean of TB - were destroyed on Thursday and tests are under way on 50 farms in mid Wales with the results expected within four days.


Farmers blame badgers for the disease spread

Mr Pugh said the spread of the disease could be "as serious, if not more serious," than foot-and-mouth.

His assessment seemed to be backed by the government's Chief Veterinary Officer for Wales, Tony Edwards, who agreed with farmers that the TB testing programmes had "slipped" because of demands on manpower during the foot-and-mouth crisis.

 

[Semyaz]

Ah well, shows what I know...!!

That's what I get when I go by what I'm told in school, and don't listen to the news...

 

[escargot]

You may have been thinking of smallpox, which HAS been eradicated. So you were listening after all!

 

[mindalai]

Interesting list.

The ward I work on has several isolation rooms and it's a rare day when we don't have at least a couple of TB patients in them. And this is in a hospital in a large, modern city in Britain. It does tend to be people who've caught the disease overseas but it's still a big problem. I'm more surprised to see RTAs in the top ten.

 

[escargot]

If the causes of death were broken down in various way - by age, sex, ethnicity, country of residence and so on - the list might be very different.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

So malignancies don't even make the top ten?

Does anybody know where malignancies do rank on this list, if it is extended?

 

[OldTimeRadio]

You may have been thinking of smallpox, which HAS been eradicated.

Has it? That's what I believed for the last two decades, but over the past couple of years I've seen smallpox mentioned more and more frequently as a bio-weapon. (Yes, I'm aware that smallpox was used as such in the past.)

Besides, is it any longer possible to truly eradicate infectious diseases? Even if every last stock of live smallpox could be utterly destroyed, couln't modern molecular biologists recreate the disease "from the numbers"?

 

[Mythopoeika]

As far as I know, smallpox is kept alive in a few laboratories throughout the world. So, yes, it could come back. *shudder*

 

[OldTimeRadio]

As far as I know, smallpox is kept alive in a few laboratories throughout the world. So, yes, it could come back. *shudder*

I seem to recall that there was a security breach in one of the British labs which caused smallpox to escape into the ventilation system and resulted in the death of a woman worker on the floor below. This was around 15 or 20 years ago.

But, again, couldn't "eradicated" diseases of this sort be reconstructed "from the numbers," that is from the DNA?

 

[mindalai]

I hadn't noticed the lack of malignancies in that list but it is interesting. It makes me think about the priority it gets in health-care budgeting. There's a lot of cancer charities, and cancer wards get a disproportionate amount of funding. I wonder if the reason cancer isn't on the list is because all the spending has paid off and people are now surviving it more often and for longer, or whether cancer has just got a higher profile than less "glamorous" (but more deadly) diseases. After all, you don't see nearly as many charities researching stroke treatment and rehab or supporting stroke survivors.

 

[Anonymous]

I seem to recall that there was a security breach in one of the British labs which caused smallpox to escape into the ventilation system and resulted in the death of a woman worker on the floor below. This was around 15 or 20 years ago.

In 1978, there was evidently an escape of smallpox from containment in a research laboratory in Birmingham, England. A medical photographer, Janet Parker, died from the disease itself, and the Professor responsible for the unit, Professor Henry Bedson, killed himself. In light of this accident, all known stocks of smallpox were destroyed, except the stocks at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Russian Vector State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Siberia, where a regiment of troops guards it.

The last case of wild smallpox occurred on October 26, 1977. One last victim was claimed by the disease in the UK in September 1978, when Janet Parker, a photographer in the University of Birmingham Medical School, contracted the disease and died. A research project on smallpox was being conducted in the building at the time, though the exact route by which Mrs. Parker became infected was never fully elucidated.

Link

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I wonder if the reason cancer isn't on the list is because all the spending has paid off and people are now surviving it more often and for longer, or whether cancer has just got a higher profile than less "glamorous" (but more deadly) diseases.

Mindalai, I had a conversation with my physician exactly a week ago which really fits here.

I'd mentioned that when I was a child people lived in fear of learning from their doctors that they had Cancer X and had but six months to live.

But years later I'd read that through modern medical advances that "six months" had been increased to six years.

"You really are behind the times," my physician said. "It's currently 11 to 20 years! Moreover, within the next five or six years that's going to increase to 30 to 40 years. And God only knows what we're going to see over the coming three or four decades."

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Thanks, friend Frobush. It was longer ago than I realized.

Does anybody know precisely why Ms. Parker died? Once she contracted smallpox shouldn't it have been treatable?

 

[CarlosTheDJ]

Interesting list.

The ward I work on has several isolation rooms and it's a rare day when we don't have at least a couple of TB patients in them. And this is in a hospital in a large, modern city in Britain. It does tend to be people who've caught the disease overseas but it's still a big problem. I'm more surprised to see RTAs in the top ten.

We have a fairly good record in the UK and the "West" nowadays, however, the rest of the world does not.

Some quotes from "Make Roads Safe, Everywhere" by Saul Billingsley, Deputy Director FIA (Federation Internationale de L'Automobile).

"Welcome To Delhi...this is a city which experiences more than 1500 road deaths a year. Nationwide [in India] around 100,000 people die and at least half a million are badly injured on the roads. These injuries cost at least 3% of India's GDP."

"The Institute of Safety & Human Factors in Pakistan estimates that 95% of drivers on Pakistan's roads have not taken any kind of proficiency test. One in three vehicles on the road in Pakistan will be involved in an injury accident at some stage."

"It is a similar, grim picture across the developing world. In China, road deaths are predicted to double by 2020. In Vietnam, which has recently experienced a huge rise in motorcycle use, 500 children are dying every month - often as bare-headed pillion passengers."

"In South Africa up to 16,000 people die on the roads each year."

"The World Health Organisation estimates that, each year, almost 1.2 million people die in road crashes worldwide, and as many as 50 million are injured or disabled. Every month a silent tsunami of road traffic crashes sweeps away 100,000 lives."


Some British statistics....(from ADI News, March 2007)

"As the number of cars on the road has steadily increased each year, the number of crashes has steadily decreased in total. In 1961 there were fewer than 9 million licensed vehicles on the road, but by 1981 there were 19.3 million and 32.9 million by 2005.

If we look at the figures for road accidents in the 50s and compare them with today's, the improvements have been quite staggering and largely due to improved driver training. The number of seriously injured casualties was approximately 29,000 in 2006 and the number of deaths just over 3200. 140 of these were children. Recent figures for fatalities are 33% below the average of the mid-90s."


So, worldwide a pretty depressing picture, but here in the UK we actually do OK. Alright, that is no comfort to the families of those poor 3200 people, but 100,000 deaths a year in India is, frankly, terrifying.

And people moan that the driving test in this country is tough.....

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Driver's licenses weren't required here until the 1920s had passed. My Mother's sister, born in 1914, began driving the family grocery store deliver truck after her Father's death in 1928, when she was 13 or 14 years old. Even when licenses eventually came in she was required to take no test, since she was already considered a veteran driver.

 

[synchronicity]

Unfortunately--as recent events have shown--drug-resistant TB is an ever-increasing threat.

I know just how deadly tuberculosis can be. Years before I was born--in fact my mother was only 6 years old at the time--my grandmother came down with a bad case of TB. This was around 1933, before the advent of anti-biotics, and the only "treatment" was to be isolated in a "sanitarium" with fellow sufferers and basically to hope for the best.

My grandmother (who also had a newborn daughter) spent several months in a sanitarium. Basically the only "treatment" was lots of fresh air (even in winter!!), lots of bed rest and eating a "healthy diet".

Out of all the people on her ward, my grandmother was the only long-term survivor. She was about 37 when she got TB; she lived to the age of 95.

Needless to say...she was one of the lucky ones.

TB is a terrible, killer disease.

 

[gerardwilkie]

Nope. TB is not only still present, being a disease of poverty, it is on the increase, with new, extra-virulent strains appearing in the last 20 years or so.

I know someone that recently contracted TB. It shocked me a lot to hear that, I'd aways imagined it as being some kind of Victorian illness and couldn't believe that this relatively healthy young man had contracted it. Makes you wonder what's coming next- bubonic plague ? :shock:

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

My mother had TB as a young woman, she spent months in a santarium. Luckily, it was around the time that penicillin and related antibiotics came along as a sure fire cure for the disease.

New strains of TB have evolved, that are resistant to many modern antibiotics. There are several causes, one might be the regular dosing of cattle (legally, or illegally), to promote rapid growth and resistance to many fairly harmless diseases, which has perversely, helped evolve antibiotic resistant disease strains, at an alarming rate.

Unfortunately, scarring on the lung, from my mothers bout of TB, appears to have been responsible for the development of terminal lung cancer, some forty five, or so, years later. So, it caught up with her at the last.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

The great American novelist Thomas Wolfe (*) died at age 38 from tuberculosis....of the brain.

He'd been raised in Ashville, North Carolina, when that hill-town was pretty much one up-scape tuberculosis sanitarium.

(*) Not to be confused with contemporary novelist and polemicist Tom Wolfe, no slouch himself.

 

[escargot]

When I worked in hospitals I occasionally looked after people with TB. It has a distinctive 'look', as the sufferer has paper-white skin.

There IS still plague around. Usually humans get the pneumonic (lung) sort, from contact with wild mammals. In the USA, where it is endemic in some areas, woodland squirrrels are constantly monitored for it.

 

[PeniG]

Okay, what's with #4 - HIV/AIDS?

Most AIDS deaths are, technically, the result of secondary, opportunistic infections - so that I would expect many of the respiratory deaths to be the result of pneumonia developing from an ordinary cold in an HIV patient. Organ failure is another common proximate cause of death ultimately derived from HIV infection. It used to be (and may in some places still be, where the stigma is strong) common for the doctor to list only the proximate cause of death in HIV-related incidents in order to maintain the privacy of the patient's family. This was the case with Isaac Asimov's AIDS-related death, for example - although his family went public with the information later, at the time they didn't feel like explaining about his infection to hordes of mourning fanboys.

So - how are these statistics compiled? (Always the first question to ask.) Do doctors in impoverished HIV-epidemic countries tend to write down HIV as the cause of death for all deaths of infected patients, regardless of proximate cause? Do the compilers have large piles of death certificates with "HIV-related pneumonia" listed as the cause of death, and if so, does HIV trump pneumonia, or is the death counted twice, once for each illness? What about other ultimate-vs.-proximate causes? How many "heart disease" deaths are ultimately "old age" deaths?

Obviously these things are all scourges, but any statistical list of discrete entities in such a case is bound to be more or less misleading, and only by understanding the method of data sorting can one make a good judgement about how misleading it is.

Hmm - you know what's encouragingly absent from the list? Complications from child birth. There's a cheery advance made in the 20th century! Let us celebrate what we can.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

In the USA, where it is endemic in some areas, woodland squirrrels are constantly monitored for it.

It is supposedly pooled in the Prairie Dog and gopher populations of our Western states.

 

[Anome]

Okay, what's with #4 - HIV/AIDS?

Most AIDS deaths are, technically, the result of secondary, opportunistic infections - so that I would expect many of the respiratory deaths to be the result of pneumonia developing from an ordinary cold in an HIV patient.

That's bit like saying death from gunshot wounds are really the result of shock, blood loss, and heart failure.

Or even, that it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom.

With most HIV/AIDS patients who die from pneumonia, or some other complication, but this cause is a result of their depleted immune system not being able to fight off quite mundane infections. In other words, the only reason they got the pneumonia was because they had HIV/AIDS. Thus, HIV/AIDS caused their death.

And yes, we should be grateful that women don't die in childbirth as often as they did. And that children generally survive past 5 years. These are great achievements of modern medicine.

 

[PeniG]

But the point is, the common HIV-mediated diseases and the HIV are given separate listings, and we don't know how the overlap is handled. I omitted to mention that TB is actually an AIDS-defining disease - if you have TB and HIV at the same time, you are considered to have AIDS, regardless of your T-cell count. It would be nice to know, for understanding the statistics, whether HIV is counted as the sole killer in all these cases, or whether some deaths are listed twice. If 50% of TB deaths are also HIV deaths, that's an important datum.

For that matter, it would be nice to have the same data for "old age," a factor which is conspicuously absent and yet which we all know to be important. If 90% of all heart disease deaths occured in patients over the age ot 80, for example, the conclusions we would draw for our own health risks would be very different than if heart disease is cause of death for only 5% of geriatric patients.

I always want more information from statistics. They're almost always presented too simplistically in the press, and I can't derive anything useful for my own life from them.

 

[PeniG]

It has been brought to my attention that it is possible for someone unfamiliar with the circumstances of Dr. Asimov's death and not well-informed on AIDS transmission to carry away the impression, based on my post, that there was infidelity or hypocrisy in his marriage. Since this is precisely the sort of misperception that the doctors feared when they persuaded the family to suppress this information, I thought I'd better clarify. All secrecy is over now, as you can find it at http://www.asimovonline.com/ ,
paging down to the following text:

In late March, 2002, Prometheus Books published It's Been a Good Life, an autobiography edited by Janet Jeppson Asimov. ...The book also includes an epilogue in which Janet Jeppson Asimov reveals for the first time that Isaac's 1992 death from heart and kidney failure was a consequence of AIDS contracted from a transfusion of tainted blood during his December 1983 triple-bypass operation. She explains how and when he learned he had the disease, and why his doctors convinced him to keep it a secret from the public. The epilogue includes a description of Asimov's final days, together with some poignant passages that describe his views of life and death.

[There have been some erroneous published reports stating that it was Janet Asimov who convinced her husband to keep the fact that he had contracted AIDS a secret. This is absolutely untrue. In fact it was Asimov's doctors who urged that the matter be kept a secret. See Janet's April 4, 2002 letter to Locus magazine.]

I am grateful to Dr. Janet for the decision, as we can't derive the proper benefit from biography unless we are told the truth.