PHA-Exchange> Comparative Quantification of Health Risks (2)

[Claudio]

Misleading presentation of health risks as two sides of the same coin

 

In relation to the quantification of health risks, we surely must make a distinction between premature, entirely avoidable deaths and deaths occurring at and after middle age.

 

There is a rather misleading tendency today to put on the one side disease and death from communicable disease and on the other side from non communicable diseases. 

 

Or for example, to put on one side of the equation the tragedy of deaths from not-enough-food on one side and the "tragedy" of death from too-much-food on the other side as if these were somehow equivalent. 

 

Is it an attempt to equalize somehow on the lines of "We are all affected - one world" - kind of discourse? 

 

This ignores the fact that deaths from heart conditions and cancers happen late in life. This is scarcely comparable to the disease and death occurring in utero, in infancy, in childhood and then for women in early adulthood from maternal mortality. 

 

Deaths from "lifestyle" diseases may indeed be premature (though people have to die of something!) but most of the victims have had years of life well into adulthood.

 

AK 

 


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