Causes of Death
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In the early part of the century, most deaths were from infectious respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia, influenza and tuberculosis. By 1910, heart disease had become the leading cause of death and has remained so for most of the century. Pneumonia and influenza remained the second leading cause until 1933, when cancer replaced them."
Note: This lung-disease spike was caused by the millions of deaths from Spanish flu in 1918 and the American pandemic of TB, which was later overcome by drugs. (TB was not as common in Europe.)
"The age-adjusted death rate from cancer has increased by about 55 percent from 1900 to 1998. "
Now this is the key. Get rid of TB and the plague-like flu and what you have left is heart disease, a disease of age and diet-lifestyle, with some genetic predisposition as everyone knows. Then Cancer pulls ahead. Why? Why did Cancer suddenly out of the blue pull ahead of heart disease? Is Cancer an old people's disease specifically? It is said to be related to environment. This does not automatically spell age. What you have to imagine, is that sometime around the war years, the age of death the population lept ahead dramatically letting Cancer win out suddenly by an astonishing margin, eclipsing the heart as the most common killer of fogies. This is hard to imagine so neatly just because of the lack of long life. As it was pointed out before, the deaths from other things, does not mask who is left. So, hearts were giving out for a brief period historically just before they could notice the rot from cells proliferating wildly. But why should heart disease take a back seat at all then? Why does it just not keep killing first? Did we conquer heart disease? Ahh! There is the rub!
What gives the lie to this is to talk to farmers. They will tell you. If they have farmed 30 years or more. When they were younger, they hardly saw cancer eye in animals at all. Now they will tell you that it is common to cut open a chicken or a beef and see them riddled with Cancer. Its the kind of thing you would notice. I have heard this from all kinds of different farmers. Now what is it the animals are doing? Smoking? High stress lifestyle, genetic predisposition? Drinking too much? What are they exposed too that humans are too? hmmmmmm well, OK ----- ------ ------ ----- pesticides? Too much of a stretch?. Now there is a simple control group for you.
EC<:-} |
