It is commonly believed that besides cancer, malaria or even car accidents kill the most people every year, but there are other causes that are more deadly. We are all primed to believe what we see and hear and certain types of deaths receive more media coverage than others, but sometimes the truth sits directly in front of us without us realizing.
A University of California, Riverside, (UCR) paper published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association abolishes all of these preconceived notions however and lays the truth at our doorstep. The study associates poverty with an estimated 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people 15 years and older.
In what is sure to come as a surprise to many, the analysis found that only heart disease, cancer, and smoking were associated with a greater number of deaths than poverty. Obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, suicides, firearms, and homicides, among other common causes of death, were less lethal than poverty.
"Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes," said David Brady, the study's lead author and a UCR professor of public policy who also serves as director of University of California, Riverside's Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty. "Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the homicides in 2019. And yet, homicide firearms and suicide get vastly more attention."
As writer David Danelski notes, "The analysis estimated the number of poverty deaths by analyzing income data kept by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and death data from household surveys from the Cross-National Equivalent File. Deaths reported in surveys were validated in the National Death Index, a database kept by the National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks deaths and their causes in the U.S."
Researchers say these findings have major policy implications and decision makers should take note - and action.
According to the study, "Because certain ethnic and racial minority groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our estimates can improve understanding of ethnic and racial inequalities in life expectancy."
In addition to poverty, and in another surprising find, a groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine has revealed that a deficiency of sunlight could be as harmful to one's health as smoking cigarettes. The study titled, "Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death: a competing risk analysis of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort," was conducted by Swedish researchers on a population of almost 30,000 women.
However, now it gets confusing.
According to the Journal of Internal Medicine, while heart disease is viewed as the number one killer in the developed world, exposure to sunlight supposedly reduces this common cause of premature death, even if it increases the risk of the number two most common cause of death - cancer. According to the study, the net effect of sunlight exposure is that people will still live longer.
Another observation by the study determines that "Nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking."
If true, this is a mind blowing finding that completely negates almost everything most people understand about the risks of sunlight exposure as well as how it compares to other risks of cancer and death.
The National Library of Medicine (NIH) observes that "Today's scientists have come to a similarly dichotomous recognition that exposure to the ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in sunlight has both beneficial and deleterious effects on human health."
The NIH further notes that "Most public health messages of the past century have focused on the hazards of too much sun exposure" but goes on to say that this is misleading since "excessive UVR exposure accounts for only 0.1% of the total global burden of disease in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), according to the 2006 World Health Organization (WHO) report The Global Burden of Disease Due to Ultraviolet Radiation."
In fact, according to the WHO, "a markedly larger annual disease burden of 3.3 billion DALYs worldwide might result from very low levels of UVR exposure," thus adding to the chorus of opinions that people need exposure to sunlight to remain healthy.
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