How We Die
June 27, 2012 4 Comments
The New England Journal of Medicine looks through 200 years of back issues to understand how we die differently:
The first thing to notice here is how much our mortality rate has dropped over the course of a century, largely due to big reductions in infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza.
The way we talk about medical conditions has changed, too..
Read on here.
About Fr Stephen Smuts
Other interesting things that we can observe in comparison from 1900 to 2010 would be how we perceive those older generations to be tougher and hardier compared to my pampered, pansy generation, how the costs of health care is now greater, and how life expectancies have increased. I’m not sure how they’re all explicitly correlated, though.
“my pampered, pansy generation”, nice I will have to remember that quote, for preaching perhaps?
But then I am a “baby boomer”. Sometimes I really wonder what this culture and world will be like when the baby boomer’s are gone? But then I remember my father said my generation were wimps at times, too. But hey, stuff rolls down hill! 
Sorry, I am lol myself!
In considering the major change in these statistics, it is noteworthy that the role of infection – bacterial or viral – plays a major part in the categories diptheria, nephropathy, heart disease, GI infections, tuberculosis and pneumonia/influenza: the prevalence of these conditions led to the rapid development of antibiotics, antifungals, and more recently, anti-viral agents, and their refinement over time.
However, the research effort into the development of new and improved anti-infective agents has been drastically reduced in favour of research conditions related to the aging westenr populations: the return on investment for a drug with a long utilization period for each patient is far better than that for anti-infectives, which are prescribed for more people, but where each prescription is for a few days.
It is therefore very probable that the bar chart in the illustration will gradually reverse itself – perhaps by 2110(?), as we see an increase in the number of cases of untreatable new infectious bacterial/viruses disease states.
2110? Humanity may not survive here by then? Indeed we have not seen “death” on a scale like this, since perhaps the Black Plague. Of course I speak more theologically and philosopically! By then perhaps, Israel and Islam will have faced off each other, Zech. 14? And of course the Free World will be broke well before that!
So at least western humanity possibly ends with a wimper? Lk. 18:7-8