Reply #263: Thank you for the link

[dsc]

Here is some of what I am talking about.

This is the data from 2002 for women ages 20 to 24.



I will have to retype it since evidently pasting won't work no matter what I do

Rank Cause deaths percent rate per 100k
all all 4662 100 47.3
1 accident 1818 39 18.4
2 assult(murder) 457 9.8 4.6
3 malignant neoplasms 415 8.9 4.2
4 suicide 345 7.4 3.5

This is the data for males of the same age group

Rank Cause deaths percent rate per 100k
all all 14,572 100.0 140.8
1 accident 6,457 44.3 62.4
2 assult (murder) 2,870 19.7 27.7
3 suicide 2,152 14.8 20.8
4 malignant neoplasms 592 4.1 5.7

Now looking at those statistics and the fact that diseases were broken down into individual diseases, we are left with a couple of conclusions. First, men, not women, are by far the more likely to be murdered (by a factor of 6) and that cancer is far closer to being number 2 than murder is to being number 1. I am not saying this isn't a problem but I am saying that the press is presenting this in as alarming manner as possible. A far more reasonable presentation of the same data would be to point out women are less likely to die of murder, cancer, and suicide combined than to die of accidents.

Secondly, diseases as a whole (just looking at the top ten causes of death) accounted for 890 deaths (causes 3, 5-7, 9-10) which is more than murder and suicide combined (802). This is as much a story about our sucess in fighting cancers that kill the young as it is a story about our failure to control murder. Just 43 more cancer deaths would have resulted in murder being the number 3 cause instead of the number 2 cause of death. Again, even one murder is too many, but this reeks of sensational journalism.