Copyright 2006 Paddock Publications, Inc.
By BURT CONSTABLE
Chicago Daily Herald (Illinois)
Nearly a half-decade removed from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden remains free and Americans remain scared.
Political groups debate the government’s new plan for dealing with the fallout of a nuclear “dirty” bomb. Security forces conduct pat-down searches on Bears fans. And thousands of law-abiding Americans continue to surrender their shoes to screeners at airport security.
Meanwhile, it is nature that grabs the terrifying headlines.
Grass fires ravage Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Governors on both coasts declare disaster areas in the wake of devastating floods. The ground in West Virginia swallows a dozen unfortunate coal miners. Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama and Mississippi still struggle to dig out of the mess left by an alphabet soup of hurricanes highlighted by Katrina and Rita.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency issued 48 emergency declarations in 2005, covering everything from landslides to blizzards.
And yet, the United States got the good treatment from Mother Nature. Our nature-inflicted death toll pales when compared to the tsunami that kicked off 2005 with hundreds of thousands of deaths, or the massive earthquakes in Asia, or Wednesday’s lethal landslide in Indonesia.
Yikes. Should we take all that post-9/11 fear we are spending on Osama bin Laden and transfer it to Mother Nature?
“You should be more concerned about heart disease than either of those things,” says Robert N. Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Data from the soon-to-be-released annual report of the National Center for Health Statistics suggest nature’s fury is a minor risk to the lives of Americans, while terrorism isn’t even on the radar screen.
“You can’t escape it. It’s all over the news. But I’m able to put it in perspective,” Anderson says of our deadly headlines. He has what could be considered a healthy outlook on fear and dying.
“While people are dying every day, the risk of any one of us dying at any given time is actually pretty small,” Anderson says.
Americans are much more likely to be killed by other Americans than by foreign terrorists, and are far more likely to kill ourselves than be killed by murderers.
While the carnage rarely captures headlines, the things most likely to kill us are the same mundane and predictable ailments that have been killing us for years.
Heart disease, which typically kills about 700,000 Americans a year, is the leading killer. Other causes of death in the top five are cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease and accidents, in that order, Anderson says. The latest report will show an increase (to 400 or so) in deaths related to pregnancy, but much of that can be attributed to more thorough record-keeping, he adds.
Go to the Web site http://wonder.cdc.gov, click on “mortality - underlying cause of death,” and you can look up causes according to age, race or other factors. The thorough categories range from myriad diseases to the rare self-inflicted death by steam.
Even in 2001, the one-two punch of terrorism and cataclysmic storms (hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, floods and such) weren’t as lethal as peptic ulcers.
While good diet, exercise and careful living can help all of us delay death, there is no practical way to dodge it.
“If you’re in your 20s, the best thing you can do to avoid death is stay out of your car,” Anderson says, speaking purely from a statistical standpoint. “When you get to your 60s, then you are worried about heart disease.”
Immersed in death with his job, Anderson doesn’t bring fear of dying home to his family, which includes Olivia, 4, Amelia, 2, and 4-month-old Erik.
While he knows virtually every way Americans die, “knowing the risk is a good thing,” Anderson says. “Knowing what I know, I am able to put it in perspective.”
So turn down the fear, turn up the exercise and healthy living, and forget about death - at least until you read the next avian flu scenario story.