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You're More Likely to Die from Brain-Eating Parasites, Alcoholism, Obesity, Medical Errors, Risky Sexual Behavior or ...
We noted in 2011:
– You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack
– You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack
— You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane
— You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack
–You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack
— You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack
– You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack
–You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack
–You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack
–You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist
–You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack
– You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack
Let’s look at some details from the most recent official statistics.
The U.S. Department of State reports that only 17 U.S. citizens were killed worldwide as a result of terrorism in 2011. That figure includes deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and all other theaters of war.
In contrast, the American agency which tracks health-related issues – the U.S. Centers for Disease Control – rounds up the most prevalent causes of death in the United States:
Comparing the CDC numbers to terrorism deaths means:
– You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack
– You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack
(Keep in mind when reading this entire piece that we are consistently and substantially understating the risk of other causes of death as compared to terrorism, because we are comparing deaths from various causes within the United States against deaths from terrorism worldwide.)
Wikipedia notes that obesity is a a contributing factor in 100,000–400,000 deaths in the United States per year. That makes obesity 5,882 to times 23,528 more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
The annual number of deaths in the U.S. due to avoidable medical errors is as high as 100,000. Indeed, one of the world’s leading medical journals – Lancet – reported in 2011:
A November, 2010, document from the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services reported that, when in hospital, one in seven beneficiaries of Medicare (the government-sponsored health-care programme for those aged 65 years and older) have complications from medical errors, which contribute to about 180 000 deaths of patients per year.
That’s just Medicare beneficiaries, not the entire American public. Scientific American noted in 2009:
Preventable medical mistakes and infections are responsible for about 200,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to an investigation by the Hearst media corporation.
But let’s use the lower – 100,000 – figure. That still means that you are 5,882 times more likely to die from medical error than terrorism.
The CDC says that some 80,000 deaths each year are attributable to excessive alcohol use. So you’re 4,706 times more likely to drink yourself to death than die from terrorism.
Wikipedia notes that there were 32,367 automobile accidents in 2011, which means that you are 1,904 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack. As CNN reporter Fareed Zakaria writes this week:
“Since 9/11, foreign-inspired terrorism has claimed about two dozen lives in the United States. (Meanwhile, more than 100,000 have been killed in gun homicides and more than 400,000 in motor-vehicle accidents.) “
According to a 2011 CDC report, poisoning from prescription drugs is even more likely to kill you than a car crash. Indeed, the CDC stated in 2011 that – in the majority of states – your prescription meds are more likely to kill you than any other source of injury. So your meds are thousands of times more likely to kill you than Al Qaeda.
The number of deaths by suicide has also surpassed car crashes, and many connect the increase in suicides to the downturn in the economy. Around 35,000 Americans kill themselves each year (and more American soldiers die by suicide than combat; the number of veterans committing suicide is astronomical and under-reported). So you’re 2,059 times more likely to kill yourself than die at the hand of a terrorist.
The CDC notes that there were 7,638 deaths from HIV and 45 from syphilis, so you’re 452 times more likely to die from risky sexual behavior than terrorism.
The National Safety Council reports that more than 6,000 Americans die a year from falls … most of them involve people falling off their roof or ladder trying to clean their gutters, put up Christmas lights and the like. That means that you’re 353 times more likely to fall to your death doing something idiotic than die in a terrorist attack.
The agency in charge of workplace safety – the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration – reports that 4,609 workers were killed on the job in 2011 within the U.S. homeland. In other words, you are 271 times more likely to die from a workplace accident than terrorism.
The CDC notes that 3,177 people died of “nutritional deficiencies” in 2011, which means you are 187 times more likely to starve to death in American than be killed by terrorism.
Scientific American notes:
You might have toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which the CDC estimates has infected about 22.5 percent of Americans older than 12 years old
Toxoplasmosis is a brain-parasite. The CDC reports that more than 375 Americans die annually due to toxoplasmosis. In addition, 3 Americans died in 2011 after being exposed to a brain-eating amoeba. So you’re about 22 times more likely to die from a brain-eating zombie parasite than a terrorist.
There were at least 155 Americans killed by police officers in the United States in 2011. That means that you were more than 9 times more likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer than by a terrorist.
And the 2011 Report on Terrorism from the National Counter Terrorism Center notes that Americans are just as likely to be “crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year” as they are to be killed by terrorists.
Let’s switch to 2008, to take advantage of another treasure trove of data.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, 33 U.S. citizens were killed worldwide in 2008 from terrorism. There were 301,579,895 Americans living on U.S. soil in 2008, so the risk of dying from terrorist attacks in 2008 was 1 in 9,138,785.
This graphic from the National Safety Council – based upon 2008 data – shows the relative risks of dying from various causes:
If the risk of being killed by a terrorist were added to the list, the dot would be so small that it would be hard to see. Specifically, the risk of being killed by terrorism in 2008 was 14 times smaller than being killed by fireworks.
Reason provides some more examples:
[The risk of being killed by terrorism] compares annual risk of dying in a car accident of 1 in 19,000; drowning in a bathtub at 1 in 800,000; dying in a building fire at 1 in 99,000; or being struck by lightning at 1 in 5,500,000. In other words, in the last five years you were four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist.
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has just published, Background Report: 9/11, Ten Years Later [PDF]. The report notes, excluding the 9/11 atrocities, that fewer than 500 people died in the U.S. from terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2010.
Terrorism pushes our emotional buttons. And politicians and the media tend to blow the risk of terrorism out of proportion. But as the figures above show, terrorism is a very unlikely cause of death.
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It is not the fear of dying that galls us.
It is knowing that the terrorists have won. We now spend billions of dollars on non-productive securitiy activities. We subject ourselves to restricted freedoms. We hire more TSA monkeys and will overpay them indefinitely until we give them excessive lieftime pensions.
The old America is gone forever. We have capitulated.
I could never figure out why "terrorism" strikes such fear and "murder" does not. What difference does it make if you are dead or maimed due to a murder attempt or through act of "terror". In my mind it is the same. Either way people are scared shitless, aren't they?
but think of the economic multiplier
If it bleeds, it leads.
I drive the Los Angeles freeways every day and night. That Mullhuland overpass is a real killer with the construction going on. Anyhow believe me I ain't afraid of no terrorists
The financial terrorists.and Government false flags are fun to fantasize about because it means civil war and finally arresting Holder and all the crooked politicians. We'll get to see Blankfein and Bernanke along with Dimon and Bush all in prison for crimes against humanity. It will be so much fun. BitCoin will be the currency and The Federal Government will be replaced by open source software. Corporations larger than 1 billion dollars will be broken up through anti-trust laws and no corporation will have individual rights. Lobbying programmers will be outlawed DHS will be turned into an internal infrastructure rebuilding program. The CIA will be focused on creating De-salination plants on the east and west coasts. The military will stop all illegal wars and be made up of the draft children from families that earn in excess of $500,000 per year. And so on.
People everywhere will be able to use the common sense that they were born with.
Here in the Commonwealth, we recently passed a law that allows possesion of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. Please tell me what brand you are smokin', 'cuz it has to be some righteous shit.
Greenie on ya, do, please tell.
- Ned
And after 70 a death by falling is more likely than a car wreck.
HOWEVER, to imply that we should not be concerned about mass killings of our citizens by any individual, group, or government by any means or method is beyond absurd.
There was a huge push to demonize and pass a Gun Bill said to be for the safety of all citizens. Now we have an Immigration Bill on the table.
Boston detracts from each of these efforts. To play down Boston and attempt to refocus on the AGENDA of Tyranny is deadly wrong.
We need to take on and push back Tyranny both foreign and home grown, including evil within, in home town and in Washington.
"There was a huge push to demonize and pass a Gun Bill said to be for the safety of all citizens"
And there should have been. There is NO gun bill that will make you safer from gun violence. Period. Go ahead, take away ever single gun in the land. You think you are safe from home made bombs? Boston just proved you are not. The gun debate should be a moot point. Liberals don't like guns, and you can't have an honest debate about it. Sure they can say lets do this or that, its reasonable. Lets have universal backround checks, blah blah blah. But ultimately, they just keep chipping away at the second amendment, because deep down, thats what they really want to eliminate guns for everyone else, but not for them. The hypocritical anti-gun crowd like Rosie Odonell don't want you to be able to protect yourself, meanwhile they have armed guards protecting their home.
"Liberals don't like guns, and you can't have an honest debate about it."
There's a difference between not liking guns and wanting them banned. I'd profer that fascists are the ones that don't want you and I to have guns.
Oh, I see, people don't believe that there's a difference between not liking guns and wanting them banned. Or, perhaps people think fascists want an open and uncontested society in which everyone can carry around guns?
Apparently there are at least two folks that would flat out fail any course in critical thinking/logic. Dumb fuckers.
Well, I can, you can, but Liberals don't understand what they might think they are talking about, maybe.
Progressives and Statists, otoh, have Gun Control as a permanent objective. Hmmmmm, wondwr why?
- Ned
Another idiotic post from Zero Hedge's most ignorant writer. Sure, terrorism can shut down our airspace for weeks, destroy our skyscrapers, force us to lock down entire cities in a manhunt for homicidal maniac bombers -- but don't worry about the potential for economic damage, because (so far) you're unlikely to die from it!
+1
Just when one thinks "This was GW's stupidest article so far", he comes up with an even stupider one.
I guess the idiotic point of the idiotic article is that the US should continue importing and subsidizing the worst scum from 3rd world countries.
I must say that is a fantastic idea!
Boston didn't need to be shut down. It was all political theatre. Sure the guy was dangerous, but so are lots of other deranged people. Remember we have largely shut down our mental health facilities and left those sad souls loose on the streets. Many of them enter politics where they do countless damage.
Economic damage??? From 9/11??? The Pentagon figured out in the mid '60s that it should have redundant computer systems, especially for the ICBMs. It was called the ARPA-Net. It morphed into the Internet. All of that Wall Street activity can ever so easily be distributed around the country.
If you want to talk messing up the power grid, I won't argue against you. But do let's first put a stop to hurricanes before worryng about terrorists. Actaully, it is the terrorist funded hurricanes which really ruin my day.
Come on. Everyone knows that hurricans are caused by too much liberal tolerance for gay people, not terrorists. Geesh.
Abortion causes hurricanes.
"force us to lock down entire cities"
I missed the /sarc
Really? We spend BILLIONS and for what?
Two moron kids walked into a locked down major sporting event with a bomb and killed people. The marathon was swarming with police, cameras and even bomb sniffing dogs BEFORE the attack - if it wasn't a false flag it was massive incompetence. The Feds had actually interviewed the older brother BEFORE the attack - I mean come on, this is what you are defending?
You want to live in a stop and frisk, no privacy, everyone treated as a potential terrorist police state - be my guest. I'd rather take the risk of a random attack than live in a prison.
I think that this could very well be the definition of what "WTF?" means.
BIG campaigns run by BIG entities = FAIL.
War on drugs.
War on poverty.
War on terrorism.
War on illiteracy.
War on...
Should be mandatory to watch the movie Brazil.
War on human rights in 3rd world brought the morons in. How about that?
He didn't say that war on terror is necessary, or that it is necessary in the current form (which violates human rights). The comment was about what an idiot GW is, and I think that's spot on!
You have a choice? The only choice I seem to have is the same given to prisoners: "seg" (segregation) or "pop" (general population).
I'd rather take the risk of a random attack than live in a prison.
Absolutely. The Watertown population were absolute pussys. Giving up their Constitutional rights to let the fascists enter their homes without a warrant and then cower under a lockdown. The ultimate insult was the "USA" chant when 99% of them are not natives of North America( USA).
"99% of them are not natives of North America"
Do you mean everyone from columbus onwards?
Are you a native american?
I have been saying this for years.
People are terrified of sharks, serial killers and plane crashes all while they sit on their ass, fat and medicated eating as much saturated fat and sugar as possible.
yeah buddy, McDonalds, Head Terrorist Organization.
You are more likely to be killed by the response to terrorism...SO DO NOT CALM DOWN.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbzooE7jtiE
Yes. Quite right. And the response to terrorism that will kill you is the annual $60 billion spent on DHS directly from freshly printed Ben Bernanke Bucks. Remember that as you die from starvation looking like you had spent six months at Club Auschwitz, or cholera because the sewage system stopped working, or burns from the riots which will follow the cancellation of food stamps.
My God didn't Osama Bin Laden succeed beyond his wildest dreams?
The new DHS officers will likely kill you too. They don't seem to be very well trained. At worst they are the arrested development, 14 going on 35 kids you knew in junior high school who liked to pull the wings off flies and really did dream about killing people. At best they are chicken s*&ts who start squeezing off rounds when they hear a car door slam. Those are the really dangerous ones.
'At worst they are the arrested development, 14 going on 35 kids you knew in junior high school who liked to pull the wings off flies and really did dream about killing people'
In england those people become police officers.
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"My God didn't Osama Bin Laden succeed beyond his wildest dreams?"
Not sure if they were his or not.
I Do know that his primary reason started with getting the US out of the Arabian peninsula. Based on this point I'd have to say that his dreams failed.
If Osama Bin Laden was the CIA asset as originally cast then I'd have to say that his part in the play was a success for the CIA (whose job it is to ensure that BIG business can continue fucking everyone [of course, they couch it in different terms, such as "ensuring there is free commerce/trade"]).
This is also a symptom of the all volunteer military. Plenty of good people join up for valid reasons (even if many are misguided and literally end up killing themselves after they see reality), but there is no doubt that our modern MIC attracts the most ruthless killers who want to kill people and there is no longer any incentive to keep them out because the machine needs warm bodies. A lot of those guys end up as cops, DHS, etc.
Especially if you have a boat.
But Rand, Fear is a marketable quanity, fear sells and sells well.
Good for getting votes for politicians, too.
Ironically, if we completely ignored the extremely low threat of actual terr'ism and took all of that money and spent it on preventative health care, people in general would live longer, happier lives. Except for the psychopaths who profit from the fear/power game.
Ironically, and as GW has pointed out, the more ludicrous the need for 'security', the louder they bey and screech for more.
Recalling general Buck Turgeson's line from Dr Strangelove when he hears of the 'Dooms Day' bomb, "Geez, I wish we had one of those."
When you mention the psychopaths profitting from the fear and power game, you are addressing the medical industry, yes? You know......all of the statin heart drugs, unnecessary hysterectomies, cat-scans, MRIs and test, tests, tests.
That would be why profit and medicine are not a perfect combination. Like most things, balance is required. You can't negotiate the price of a bypass when you're on your way to the hospital in an ambulance, and you don't have the ability to know if you are being sold an MRI because the prescribing doctor owns a holding company that purchased the MRI center.
"That would be why profit and medicine are not a perfect combination."
General rule: perverse incentives yield perverse results. Same with private prisons, police ticket quotas and most asset seizure laws, etc..
We're basing all this discussion on a system that could NEVER be sustainable. You cannot pick and choose parts of it, it operates as a whole.
As resources become scarcer profits will go down because less people will be able to afford the care products (poor economies of scale will crush margins- those MRI machines won't be able to pay for themselves, let alone all the other high-tech stuff that would be used on the handful [compared to global population] of rats). This WILL be the direction no matter what we do now to the existing system.
Pulling out "for profit" out of the system still results in a BIG system. BIG = FAIL.
Good news: in the future we'll be dying less of heart disease and such.
Bad news: in the future we won't be living as long because we'll be dying of physical injuries and, to a degree, waves of disease (the diseases would be coming no matter what anyway).
Yours is pretty close to the premise of many of our "rulers" (meaning those unelected folks who control our elected policitians with money and other tools) who see the world as a fight between who will be the Lords and who will be the Serfs. I think there is still plenty to go around and that we should strive for real world solutions. If it turns into Mad Max then we won't have to worry about this shit anyway. Until then, constructive debate should include the possibility that society will only crumble if we let it.
Ironically, preventative health care has little to do with money and more to do with individual mindset.
True for some, but certainly not for all. There are quite a few people for whom a trip to the doctor for a check up is a luxury they can't afford. And there are those who can afford it who don't go. Truth in the middle.
LTER-you continue to view the status quo of high health care costs as some 'inevitable/inherent' thing, when the reality is that it could have real market dynamics (quality up/costs down) of any other good or service if .gov got out of the way. What govt has done to alter the provision of health care in this country permeates so much. Above posters are right about the abdication of personal responsibility, and the FDA is a disaster, too. Incentives are not for prevention, but rather to socialize lousy behaviors a la 'there's a pill for that.'
I agree that .gov is part of the problem. Private insurance companies and a self-regulated private entity called the AMA which restricts med school admission and drives up prices for doctors to become doctors are a bigger part of the problem. How about we address all of the above instead of just repeating ideology?
There is not free entry and exit into the medical profession, true, but government is the one that uses force to protect this industry. There are plenty of associations in other industries that firms want to be a part of to signal reputation/trustworthiness, etc. These private associations are free to gate-keep as long as say a customer is not restricted to members of said group. Say somebody can't afford or whatever one of the professionals in the association, but is willing to take the chance to pay less and still get a procedure done, and will let someone not a part of the assn. do it. That ought to be allowed to happen. Private contracts.
Licensure is the true rent-seeking. .Gov mandates these things, and it is nothing but a way to protect rents and limit competition. It's but one aspect of the whole issue with how health care functions in this country. Minute clinics and other things are popping up where people pay for minor things that otherwise would cost a lot. This is a free market. I saw on Stossel's show the other night some guy who has a medical facility and hires independent physicians and surgeons to perform surgeries of whatever kind at a fraction of the cost of the non-profit hospitals. This is the market at work. A lot of the things they want you to think take a 'big time' professional can actually be done by people who have studied for awhile, and know what they can do, and what they are limited to, such as nurse-like practices popping up at minute clinics at retail stores.
The insurance companies are corporate welfare queens and love having a partner in government. Real insurance would be demanded in a free market but only for catastrophes; everything else is paid for as one goes, with direct skin in the game. And of course the meddling by .gov has led to peoples' health care being tied to their job, which limits them, and is obviously inefficient.
I don't want a new government 'solution' to fix the old one. I just want the market to be allowed to function. It will bring things into balance and get people out of this 'oh, health care is TBTF/too 'special' to let be dictated by the market' paradigm.
As an analogue to the last paragraph in the above response, it's like people saying 'we need to break up the big banks.' To which I respond by saying just let capitalism work. They would be bankrupt if they had to suffer the consequences of the lousy bets they made. All this financial regulation just makes things worse and is often subject to the revolving door of the regulators and regulated, and the banks just invent more exotic derivatives. Capitalism itself protects us infinitely better than could any bureaucrat like surfer Bart Chilton.
One big problem with the free market solution is that the free market tends to correct problems after they occur. So if you have a medical group which is cheap but full of untrained hacks, they will eventually go out of business from lawsuits but only after a lot of people suffer needlessly. The free market is good for a lot of things but it is not a panacea for anyone willing to put aside their ideology and really think about what a truly free market medical system would look like (think Mexico).
Come on, would you go to see a 20-yo doctor if you could see a 40-yo doctor instead?
If you'd go to the former just because he's cheaper, well, why should that be a market problem? It'd be a greed problem and we know markets punish greed.
Risk is risk, and it is there whether one wants to acknowledge that or not. Abdicating personal responsibility and instituting an organized system of theft, i.e., government, to provide 'safety' only makes matters worse. Bureaucrats themselves are not subject to competition because their power does not come from the marketplace. Government programs are the TRUE monopolies.
True not everyone would have time to do due diligence on which docs might be quacks, bad remedies, etc., but demand would arise for firms to rate these providers a la a Yelp or Consumer Reports who would do that for a fee. Those firms would compete on reputation and price to earn customers' trust in choosing best quality and value for healthcare, unlike FDA which is just a monopoly.
Just remember, too, that this whole current paradigm is a house of cards, built on debt. And debt matters. People think things are 'civilized' because they have been numbed from the consequences of overspending, and don't realize that capital is indeed scarce. And as I said, to respond to some of your points, there would be private assocations that would say 'hey, we have prestige/proven results' and then people would see that as a signal of quality and know that going outside the bounds of reputed firms means caveat emptor.
As I said, the risk is there. Government only makes things worse, because it is nothing but force. There is no free lunch. I'm better protected by the market than I am by bureaucrats.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. While I think you are dead on in some of your ideas, you are ignoring the real human cost that would be involved in allowing any clown with a scapel to start cutting people. In a true free market as you envision, there would be 10 pseudo-doctors lined up behind each one that went out of business for killing people. There would always be demand among the poor for the cheapest doctor in town, and I don't believe that "personal responsibility" includes the responsibility to die and suffer horribly and needlessly in the name of ideology.