Apparently 37,000 people die from lung cancer in the UK each year, and it is figures like this that have supposedly motivated the government to introduce a smoking ban. It is only recently, seeing my father die, and then seeing ‘non-small cell lung cancer’ going down on his death certificate that I think hang on a minute. Doubtless, because he smoked during his life and because that cause of death has been slapped on his certificate he will become one of those statistics, though 10% of those who develop lung cancer have never smoked, he gave up over a decade ago, and ‘non-small cell lung cancer’ was really a case of ‘select one cause because there ain’t room on the certificate for them all’. But my biggest quibble about all this is that he was 79 and WE ALL HAVE TO DIE OF SOMETHING. The Grim Reaper does not negotiate. Really, we’re not immortal, we all die, and the process is usually, unless we have the foresight to pack ourselves off to a Swiss clinic, lonely, undignified, uncomfortable and often painful. And these facts are not changed by cutting down on the burgers, booze and fags. In fact, I sometimes wonder if taking the so-called healthy route is a practical guarantee of ending up gaga and wearing nappies in some crappy OAP home, where eventually the usual ‘heart failure’ or ‘dementia’ or ‘cancer of–’ will go down on your certificate, doubtless to be picked up by statisticians then pc idiot politicians as an excuse for again telling us what to do. A reality, avoided by many, is that cancer rates have increased because nowdays we don’t die of the thousands of maladies we’ve found cures for. These high cancer rates are in fact a victory for medical science. What I would really like to know is how old were those 37,000. Checking, I see that this form of cancer is rare in those below 40 and from thereon the level rises steadily to peak at ages 70 to 79. Take a look at this graph (from 2003).
Working the figures roughly you’ll see that deaths from lung cancer from ages 40 to 69 about equal the number of deaths from ages 70 to 79 when, really, we should expect to die. As such, that 37,000 is very misleading. Don’t you think that if these deaths are to be laid at the door of the evil cigarette the figure should first have the non-smoking 10% subtracted and then be halved? To put it all even more into perspective, the UK death rate of 2006 was 10.13 per 1000 people, which works out at a total of 613,971. And yes, they all died of something…
Tag: Health
Cancer.
Just to keep you guys updated with the situation in the Asherverse: though the writing is going well and I fully intend to supply you all with your fix of outrageously violent and complicated science fiction, things ain’t going that great on a personal level. Over the last year, I’ve entered that town called shitsville, the one we all have to enter at some time or other, in that my father is dying of cancer. It’s in his lungs, liver and pancreas and, with the traumas of frequent visits from paramedics and frequent visits to the hospital, he has been steadily going downhill. Now we have reached the endgame. A hospital bed has been delivered, along with an oxygen supply and liquid morphine, and he’s now ensconced in the music room where he used to practise on his saxophone and clarinet (as well as being a lecturer in applied mathematics he was also a jazz musician too). He now looks like someone straight out of Belsen, and is eating less. Dying. That’s all really. Not sure when I’ll be posting here again. Maybe I’ll be doing it lots, maybe I’ll be gone for a while. Bear with me.
Roller Trainers.
A boy was badly injured his morning because he shot in front of a car on his wheeled trainers. Questions are being asked. A&E doctors talk of the injuries kids receive whilst using these things: busted bones and cuts and grazes. Health and Safety commissars demand that children wear protective gear and, of course, there is talk of a ban.
Hang on.
Now, as mentioned here in the comments, must parents bubble-wrap their children? Which would they prefer, an active child who risks a busted elbow and the remote possibility of death, or the fat slob slouched in front of his X-Box who’ll need his jaw wired shut or stomach stapled and risks snuffing it from a heart attack before he’s thirty?
Also, if you bubble-wrap your children they’ll never learn to handle the real world, you know, the one where hammers are made out of steel and not rubber, where knives cut, concrete is not layered with foam rubber, cars smash your bones if you step in front of them and where sticking your hand into the wrong part of the machine on the factory floor results in your arm disappearing into the cogs. Yeah, there’s the compensation claims, but they ain’t going to sew your arm back on.