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The US starts the clock one a breath is made by the child. Other European countries use weight, length, and some other factors to determine when life starts. With the US saving so many premature and all of them counting when they die from being so premature it lowers the US numbers.

[ citation needed ]

What we actualy see is::

The 10 countries with the highest rates of preterm birth per 100 live births:

        Malawi: 18.1 per 100
        Comoros: 16.7
        Congo: 16.7
        Zimbabwe: 16.6
        Equatorial Guinea: 16.5
        Mozambique: 16.4
        Gabon: 16.3
        Pakistan: 15.8
        Indonesia: 15.5
        Mauritania: 15.4

I.E. high preterm birth rates are a good sign of being a 3rd world country.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs363/en/index.html

Also death counting is different, US counts all people who die on its soil for other countries they don't count non-citizens.

[ citation needed ]

Look at charts to see life expectancy from ages 5,25,50,75 and that listing changes.

Got a link?

This looks interesting:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62587/

Looking at e50 for example the US is behind AUS, CAN, DNK, ESP , FRA.

The CIA seem less bothered about the comparison problem than you:

This entry contains the average number of years to be lived by a group of people born in the same year, if mortality at each age remains constant in the future. The entry includes total population as well as the male and female components. Life expectancy at birth is also a measure of overall quality of life in a country and summarizes the mortality at all ages. It can also be thought of as indicating the potential return on investment in human capital and is necessary for the calculation of various actuarial measures.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html

Thanks man. That's actually very nice to know because it restores my confidence in vaccines, they really hyped the Pandemrix/Narcolepsy stuff in swedish media so I didn't really know what to think. It seems the quotes in your link were from good, credible sources too (World Health Organization).

Again, I really do appreciate it.

Influenza is and has always been lethal. There are different types of influenzavirus A, and they are named based on the two main proteins that allow it to infect cells: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). A new strain can result from mutation after an influenza virus is transmitted from an animal species to humans. My understanding is that (small) viral mutations occur all the time; thus, we create a flu vaccine based on the three strains that we believe are going to be most common in the next year. These are the seasonal epidemics, and are caused by antigenic drift. The "old" strains will either have died out or many people will still have immunity to them. However, if a gene reassortment occurs involving strains from different animal species (antigenic shift), then a global pandemic can result. The pandemic ends after people begin developing immunity to the new strain, and new infections begin to drop, and this phase is called the post-pandemic phase.

(In response to your other post...) incidentally, I have narcolepsy, although it wasn't caused by the vaccine. I wonder how the vaccine may have lead to these cases, though.

The debate with Bush is a great example of the problem.

"Now, the difference in our plans is I want that 2,000 to go to you, and the vice president would like to be spending the 2,000 on your behalf."

And it is, of course, a completely accurate statement - Bush wants the $2,000 to go to the voter, because he knows that more of it will end up in the pockets of his campaign contributors. What it doesn't cover is the value for that money.

I'm mystified why the USA is not familiar in general with these numbers (it probably has something to do with media ownership). Here we go ( taken from 2006 WHO data) :

The USA spent $6,719 per capita on healthcare.
The UK spent $2,815 per capita.

The UK and the USA have roughly equivalent health outcomes. The UK has universal coverage, and no-one goes bankrupt because of medical expenses. The USA has 50M people uninsured who would have to choose between losing a finger and sending their kids to college.

Incidentally, Cuba spent $674 per capita, has (per capita) more doctors, more hospital beds, equivalent life expectancy and better cancer mortality rates. If the USA were really proper capitalists, they'd outsource all their healthcare to Cuba, who can apparently provide a quality product at around a tenth the cost.

I fail to see how the world food programme, the construction of refugee camps, malaria and AIDS prevention, child protection and education are bad for anyone, let alone "the rest of us."

Unless, of course, you mean that you're unwilling to pay taxes to support such efforts. In which case you'd seem like a selfish bastard but I'd reluctantly agree that human decency should be optional. I would go on to point out that most of the UN's humanitarian programs are financed by voluntary contributions from member states.

No filtration method is perfect or fool-proof. Slow sand is one of the best. If you'd like to claim otherwise (as you seem to be doing) you'll have to argue with pretty much every respected authority on the planet. Let's start with the World Health Organization:

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/publications/ssf/en/index.html

FYI, some forms of female circumcision are less drastic than male circumcisions. From the World Health Organization's page on female circumcision:

Type IV — All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example: pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.

Some of of the other types outlined by the WHO are also less drastic than you describe.

See a longer comparison of male and female circumcision here. Another interesting note from a peer-reviewed article:

There is in fact evidence that female circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection in women (Stallings and Karugendo 2005), but given Western cultural preferences it is unlikely that there will ever be clinical trials to test and confirm the possibility.

It's the same sort of factors that are being used as reasons to increase rates of male circumcision in Africa.

I think you'll find modern sewage systems actually spread the SARS virus. A vaccine would have been better.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2003/pr70/en/

From the WHO

A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.

The whole report is worth reading - there's a lot of information in there and a FAQ on the second page.

The estimated 4000 casualties may occur during the lifetime of about 600 000 people under consideration. As about quarter of them will eventually die from spontaneous cancer not caused by Chernobyl radiation, the radiation-induced increase of about 3% will be difficult to observe. However, in the most highly exposed cohorts of emergency and recovery operation workers, some increase in particular cancers (e.g., leukemia) has already been observed.

The report also notes that there is a tendency to attribute all health problems in a wide area to Chernoybl, and that the major problem is trauma from the panic.

I believe it's arguable whether Chernoybl should be included in any discussion - the cause of the incident was not an accident, it was deliberate (even if those doing it clearly had no idea of what they were doing). So, yeah, you turn off all the safeties and backups, then scram the reactor and ignore the subseqent alarms. Uh... not the greatest idea?

I found the report to which you refer, and they ranked countries' health care by the following metrics of "quality":

Fairness in financial contribution (determined by low cubed absolute deviation in health spending)
Level of health in "disability-adjusted life years"
Distribution of health (low cubed abs. dev.)
Level of "responsiveness"
Distribution of responsiveness (again, low cubed abs. dev)
Health expenditure per capita

and three summary rankings which are based on the others.

With the exception of responsiveness- a metric into which they've shoved many aspects of quality, such as wait times, patient privacy, and patient autonomy- where the US ranked #1, none of these metrics tell us anything about the quality of health care. They don't tell us about the value of medical goods, services, and procedures received.

You cannot rank health care by citizens' health; different people and cultures make different choices with respect to lifestyle, diet, etc. Again, you have to look at the services

Forcing wait times, patient choices, etc to be roughly equal is not generally an improvement. In nationalized health care systems, the long queues for services are an integral part of the system, helping to reduce demand for "free" services enough that the supply can meet it, and consumer choice is equally restricted across the board. You expect such systems to have relatively equal but long wait times and relatively equal but poor patient autonomy. That's not a plus.

I've already explained above why low health expenditures per capita are not an indication of quality health care.

Low variance in health expenditures is actually a measure of restriction on people's freedoms, not of health care quality; people with different incomes will normally be willing to spend different amounts.

I think that by using a nonstandard measure of variation (cubed absolute difference rather than variance/standard deviation) they're fudging the statistics to overemphasize equality of outcomes.

I don't feel at all bad that US health care ranks poorly according to such an arbitrary and useless set of metrics.

The FEMA coffins are easy. Do you know how quickly a few hundred thousand dead bodies becomes a major, MAJOR health hazard?

No need to dream up any New World Order conspiracy theory, either. One large earthquake and tsunami will do just fine.

Or you could remind yourself that a volcano with the ability to wipe out half of Seattle with less than an hour's warning is considered one of the most dangerous volcanos in the world today.

Or, for an extra shit and/or giggle, consider the consequences if the 1918 flu strain were to happen again...How many coffins would you suddenly need to find then? Bit late to be placing 50,000 unit orders at that stage of the game...

"The percentage of cases attributed to obesity varied widely for different cancer types but was as high as 40 percent for some cancers, particularly endometrial cancer and esophageal adenocarcinoma."
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/obesity

"Dietary factors have been thought to account for about 30% of cancers in Western countries1, making diet second
only to tobacco as a preventable cause of cancer."
http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/public_health_nut6.pdf

This is one of the most misinformed comments I have ever seen on /. You clearly have no knowledge whatsoever about the Indian farmer suicide problem, which began years before Monsanto started selling GM seed in India, and is absolutely nothing to do with the company. The suicides are, according to most analyses I've seen, usually linked closely with widespread crop failures which follow monsoon drought seasons. It's a climate problem, not a Monsanto problem.

If you check your own source, it states: "monsoons leading to a series of droughts, lack of better prices, exploitation by Middlemen, all of which have led to a series of suicides committed by farmers across India." If the droughts were the main cause then prices would go up from lack of supply. Since prices are falling, the pricing problem is largely for other reasons, including middlemen like Monsanto.

And farmer suicide being the #2 killer in India? That's so stupid it hurts to read. If you check the WHO mortality data, you'll find non-communicable diseases and infectious diseases account for 9/10 of the top ten causes of death, with accidental injury being the 10th.

Again, if you check your own source, the WHO data is irrelevant since it's for all of India, not just farmers. If you check your Wikipedia source, this states that farmer suicides are increasing.

Please, in future, try not to comment until you have the slightest clue what you're talking about.

You would do well to take your own advice; but then apologists rarely do.

Additional sources: Monsanto in India and Vandana Shiva.

This is one of the most misinformed comments I have ever seen on /.

You clearly have no knowledge whatsoever about the Indian farmer suicide problem, which began years before Monsanto started selling GM seed in India, and is absolutely nothing to do with the company. The suicides are, according to most analyses I've seen, usually linked closely with widespread crop failures which follow monsoon drought seasons. It's a climate problem, not a Monsanto problem.

And farmer suicide being the #2 killer in India? That's so stupid it hurts to read. If you check the WHO mortality data, you'll find non-communicable diseases and infectious diseases account for 9/10 of the top ten causes of death, with accidental injury being the 10th.

Finally, patents do last for 20 years in the USA! Not 100 years.

Please, in future, try not to comment until you have the slightest clue what you're talking about.

This is apt. B&MGF uses first world money to fight a set of illnesses which cause the greatest amount of suffering from any cause except for hunger (NTDs), but which the first world has nefariously ignored for decades.

As far as household objects go, a mylar emergency blanket might do the job. Your best bet is to stick with commercially rated filters... here's an interesting article from the World Health Organization about safely viewing the sun.

"Spoiler: they're somewhere between "nobody" and "fewer than have died this year from cholera"."

Cholera had 202,407 cases with 5,259 deaths in 2006 alone, so it's a few less? What a relief.
http://www.who.int/vaccine_research/diseases/diarrhoeal/en/index3.html

1) I didn't claim monkeypox was a good candidate for a pandemic.
2) Do you have any believable citations for your claim on how monkeypox spreads?

The following contradicts your claim:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs161/en/

Secondary transmission is human-to-human, resulting from close contact with infected respiratory tract excretions, with the skin lesions of an infected person or with recently contaminated objects. Transmission via droplet respiratory particles has also been documented. Transmission can also occur by inoculation or via the placenta (congenital monkeypox). There is no evidence to date that person-to-person transmission alone can sustain monkeypox in the human population.

Despite the last sentence, based on the rest of the paragraph I doubt you'd still want anyone who might have monkeypox to roam freely.
1) It's still a nasty disease to get
2) Some other animal might get it from the human, and monkeypox might be sustainable in that species.

Seems that Prairie Dogs can get it.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5224a1.htm
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/3/03-0878_article.htm
And I doubt all the 87 infected humans were exposed to the blood of prairie dogs, or bitten.

Interesting note, under US sanctions Iraq's water supply became poisoned and killed many more children than your Taliban citation. Who knew right?

http://www.emro.who.int/publications/emhj/0604/20.htm

For now ignoring your first point. Take a look at the top right map of countries with conscription based military. These include my own country and many Islamic and Arab ones. I strongly refuse the notion that anyone that have or might some day serve in the army should be considered legitimate military targets.

higher chance of being killed [in traffic than by terrorism]

This is correct. I also suspect that traffic is a higher cause of death than murder in any country. Which is again second to heart disease diseases. However I fail to see how this is relevant. Are you suggesting that Israel should stop worrying about terrorism until it's higher than traffic incidents (and vica versa with murders in other countries)?

Any particular reason why [not discuss land ownership]

My reason is that I'm tired of arguing with people that haven't done more historical homework than looking at newspapers. You seem to have gone further, so I'll quickly state my view on it. First a history resume of the british mandate of palestine. As the link is written by Israelis it should be taken with a grain of salt. A key point is that what is now called Jordan were also part of the full cake. Ignoring that point you are right that a majority (55%?) were given to a minority (35%). But most of the land were located in the next to useless Negev desert. It was also calculated a lot of Jewish migration to happen. Yes many from western countries, but also a huge amount from Arab and Islamic countries. So in my view it's a bit like the exchange between Greece/Turkey or India/Pakistan, not simply a foreign invasion. In any case, there were no real negotiations about this. Neighboring Arab countries simply attacked, demanding everything.

Regarding the Gaza blockade issue, what would you do in Israels shoes? Hamas doesn't even bother to hide his intentions of destroying Israel. And with support of Iran or other countries, they pose similar danger as Cuba when the Soviets were transporting missile bases there. They hold a blockade till today (imho now unjustified). Act of war or not, I'd prefer a blockade before an outright invasion. The intents also matters. In the wikipedia article you linked to, the Egyptian president announced before the 6 day war:

Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight

Moving on. You answer my question about IDF terror motive with another question. I've spoken to many Arabs that have the idea that the "zionist regime" is a machine that is evil, just for being evil, even at the cost of bad international press. Is this what you're suggesting? And yes, Quassam rockets sucks as a military weapon. So what? I don't know your hometown, but if I came close to it, and started to launch such rockets against it, would you ignore the threath?

The lives, especially civilian lives lost from the King David hotel attack were tragic indeed. But the hotel were the British headquarters. Sounds like military to me. Also key scientists working on building nuclear bombs for a religious fanatical regime that is publicly working to destroy the state might also sound like a military target. I don't think I'd call the bombing of the Pentagon building in 2001 a terrorist attack either.

But if that's the case, then one of the many many countries with no socilization of their health care system at all ought to have better outcomes than the US. So show me one.

Here, I'll even do a little of the legwork. The World Health Organization ranked countries by healthcare efficency here. The USA ranked 37th (of about 190). So if the real culprit, as you folks are claiming, is how "free market" the system is, then which of those 36 more efficient countries has a free-er healthcare market than us?

suicides at FoxConn amount to about 3 in 100,000. Since FoxConn has around 900,000 employees -- it seems like a lot, but it's less than the average in the US or China.

And misses the important fact that Chinese rural suicide rates are actually very high. Many Chinese are very happy to not be in the countryside any more when they get an urban factory job.

Admittedly this data is a bit old, but it does come from WHO (and not just some blog):

http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/chin.pdf/

Suicide rate among people aged 25-34 is 15.1 per 100,000.

Dang, first post got eaten. Anyways - on enforcing the law. I did some research. It bans the importation and manufacture of non-compliant bulbs. It doesn't make selling them domestically illegal, nor possession, etc... So unless you're running a factory or importing business, I don't think you have to worry. Just like the toilets. They aren't going to break down people's doors looking for them.

Even you can see the right answer. So why go with a wrong one?

Remember I only stepped in to explain the analogy. Didn't say I agreed with it. I think we can both agree that pollution, especially too much of it, can be bad.

But not from light bulbs.

Let's see: ~70k deaths from air pollution in the USA per year. The UK is 50k. Worldwide is 1.3M per year.
Lighting is 9% of electricity usage.
Eyeballing this and averaging the four sources, I get 24% of air pollution from energy production and distribution. EPA says 67% sulfur dioxide, 23% nitrogen oxide. I dropped CO2. That would be 45%. I'll stick with 24%.

Using a straight blame - 70k deaths from air pollution. 17k would be from electricity generation. 1.5k for pollution from powering lights, on average. 28k worldwide.
So yeah, I can trace thousands of deaths to the pollution from light bulbs. Making matters worse - there's plenty of survivors affected - per 75 deaths there are '505 hospital admissions for asthma and other respiratory diseases, 3,500 respiratory emergency doctor visits, 180,000 asthma attacks, 930,000 restricted activity days, and 2,000,000 acute respiratory symptom days.' Per 75 deaths seems an odd measure to use, but it's what the article listed. That's a lot of lost labor due to the pollution.

As for the baseload vs peak - 'not many lights are left on overnight'? I refer you to this image. And coal power isn't entirely baseload - fire up another boiler, spin another turbine. It might have to be scheduled a bit more compared to hydro or NG, but it's there.

Look, it's not that we don't agree on some things, it's just that, well, if you're going to argue this stuff, you need to do it right, and denying facts isn't going to help. I lean majorly libertarian, but given the pollution levels in my town on occasion,

R&D spending is the second largest expenditure most pharmaceutical companies make. The largest expenditure is marketing, of course.

Don't forget this. http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Js6160e/6.html Look at table 4.3. The only markets that matter are the US and western Europe. Everywhere else is peanuts in comparison. The US, Europe and Japan collectively pay for the vast majority of the world's drug R&D through both government grants, venture capital and big pharma research.

I realize this is cynical but...

According to the WHO ~7.6 million people die of cancer each year: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs297/en/ and according to the National Cancer Institute ~1.6 million of them are Americans: http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html

That's a huge revenue stream for the drug companies to just ignore because "hey, it's cured!" I just don't think the drug companies won't start looking for ways to kill this or put it out of reach of most people. They haven't exactly proven to be altruistic and wholly forthcoming thus far; they're just for-profit companies in the same old "corrupt American capitalist" system.

Yes. That's correct. WHO defines skinny.

Belgians don't have a very good safety record as drivers either. http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/43314/E92789.pdf Shows that the Belgians have twice the number of people dying, compared to their next door neighbor, the Netherlands. Even Germany, with the no-speed-limits Autobahn only has about 60% of the number of casualties. Maybe it's not just about lighting, but also about culture and driver education.

Oncologists are now held liable for 7.6 million deaths in 2008 alone.

Actually one particular swine flu vaccination did cause narcolepsy.

http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/communicable-diseases/influenza/news/news/2011/09/finnish-national-narcolepsy-task-forces-final-report-published

http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/influenza/pandemic/h1n1_safety_assessing/narcolepsy_statement/en/index.html

But I call total and utter bullshit on "many". It was just a few cases out of millions of vaccination doses and it was determined that the populations affected already had a genetic disposition to narcolepsy.

Actually one particular swine flu vaccination did cause narcolepsy.

http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/communicable-diseases/influenza/news/news/2011/09/finnish-national-narcolepsy-task-forces-final-report-published

http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/influenza/pandemic/h1n1_safety_assessing/narcolepsy_statement/en/index.html

But I call total and utter bullshit on "many". It was just a few cases out of millions of vaccination doses and it was determined that the populations affected already had a genetic disposition to narcolepsy.

A report reviewing some of the research as of 1980: Health Risks from Drinking Demineralised Water.

Low-mineral water markedly: 1.) increased diuresis (almost by 20%, on average), body water volume, and serum sodium concentrations, 2.) decreased serum potassium concentration, and 3.) increased the elimination of sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium and magnesium ions from the body.

And by the way, how many subsistence farmers do you know that committed suicide due to farming?

I don't think you've ever been a rural subsistence farmer...

People are two to five times more likely to kill themselves in rural areas of China than in cities.

Suicide in China accounts for 26% of all suicides worldwide: It is the fifth leading cause of death in the country.

The suicide situation is slowly becoming better in rural China as the economy improves, rural people can migrate for work, leading to people of different generations to no longer live together as long as they used to - a source of much traditional tension within rural families.

18 suicides per million workers at Foxconn? OK, that's very sad, but the Chinese national average is 220 per million. More than 12X higher

And in fact, the rate of suicides in the good old US of A in 2005 was 177 per million among males and 45 per million among females. That's in the USA! .

(Do note that the WHO link shows the numbers in suicides per 100,000, not per million).

Fool, if you drink distilled water every organ in your body will implode and you'll be lucky to live to the age of 4!

P.S. Only ask for premium cardboard from fresh paper pulp, not the recycled crap that the government and big corporations want you to feed on!

Now seriously: Health risks from drinking demineralised water, F. Kozisec (World Health Organization, 2004) http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutdemineralized.pdf

So, if you insist that your posts are legit, then follow through on your extraordinary claim that a diet consisting solely of rice, milk, canola oil and the occasional carrot is sufficient. I asked you to name a single country, hospital, or clinic that will state as much. You haven't.

On the other hand, here are several countries official guidelines.

And is the one from the World Health Organization

Not one of them agrees with your claims. The diet you proposed is deficient and unhealthy.

Got me thinking: even getting up from bed disturbs a person sleeping next to you, in varying degrees. So an 'on-call' incident for one employer, lowers productivity for a different employer.

For a cheap, reliable option, strap a smartphone on an armband, and write a program to poll your alerting system. Its better to poll than to wait for events - that way, at least your app knows whether it can reach the alerting system or not. Who knows, perhaps there's already "an app for that"? But be sure to have the app switch your cellular radio off (and leave Wifi on) -- the WHO classifies them as possible carcinogens.

You're the one talking out of your ass. Iodine levels in the US population are considered on average higher than they should be, according to the World Health Organization. Maybe you should check your information before you parrot.

"I checked his sources and his numbers,"
Ok . . . Your source is some guy named "BW" and you, some guy named "Tomato42," have peer reviewed his work . . . Also, just because your raw data comes from more credible sources (though, I have supplied evidence of controversy regarding some of the results from those sources), that credibility is in no way automatically transferred to the sequential work done by "BW." Furthermore, his work excludes consideration of the ongoing Fukushima accident and wastes time on things like deaths from falling from roofs (while failing to pay adequate attention to actual material information, like possible contribution to the cancer epidemic). Consequently, it seems that our disagreement stems on our differing standards of what constitutes as "fact."

"First: where am I supposed to get you a peer-reviewed paper on Fukushima if the accident is still ongoing?"
You are not supposed to. That is my point. Your claim is baseless at this point due to the unprecedented ongoing Fukushima event. And, again, you think this issue is so simple that you can just use rudimentary arithmetic to project the damage. Damage is not just caused by total radioactive isotope release (which the estimates for seem to double every couple of months, and it is still unclear when the release will actually stop, if ever . . .). For instance, how easy is it to completely ignore things like population density?

"Second: How is stating that cancer is the largest killer in UK contradictory to, for example air pollution from coal burning?"
Simply put, when at least 7.6 million people are dying a year from cancer, you would expect a large part of any analysis on energy impact to focus on what percentage of that was caused by what energy source (coal, nuclear, etc . . .). An analysis that wastes time on immaterial things like roof solar installation related deaths is a complete joke and is just trying to fill up space where factual data does not yet exist.

I am now satisfied I sufficiently understand the basis of your claim. It seems obvious that insufficent data exists to calculate to a level of appropriate accuracy to support your claim, and I am confident that few people with decision making authority would ever consider that 'BW' source you posted as a credible source (even with your "peer review"). It is a bit sad to think that some people hold such strong beliefs that they would claim such things as facts on sites like Slashdot, but I am hopeful that moderation will prevent such falsities from wasting too much mindshare.

Finally, you easily dismiss the opinions of a significant group of professionals who have devoted their lives to this topic. Perhaps you are also a professional in a relevant field and think you have grounds to do so. I, like the rest of the public, am not. Therefore, I must base my assumptions of the facts on the statements of others while considering things like expertise, credibility, perceived self-interests, and overall availabity of underlying data. Perhaps one day I will come across sufficient evidence to support your claim, but until that day comes, I consider you claim to not be fact but a belief. Furthermore, your imposing your beliefs as facts on others only increases the level of noise within the debate, doing a disservice to all those involved.

You may want to check out, well, the facts.

Your "facts" are utter bullshit, and you're an idiot for putting them forth. This well-known page, that comes back each time an idiot feels like defending NP, says that the WHO announced 4000 deaths from Chernobyl in 2005 but fails to indicate that the same WHO admitted later that the report was "a political communication tool" and issued a new statement in 2006 pointing at very different figures.

Also comparing rooftop fall deaths to nuclear is ridiculous because you're comparing very shoddy construction practices to the extreme requirements of nuclear, but nothing prevents people from using proper equipments and practices when going on roofs. Also it ignores solar thermal energy which is probably the cleanest and safest way of generating electricity bar none.

Ultimately the issue here is that you need to consider the intrinsic risks, which are high with nuclear, not the mitigated risks, which indeed have been reduced but mostly by pure luck.

Anyway believe what you want but don't blind yourself with partisan bullshit when trying to form an opinion.

Solar (or geothermal and definitely not wind) isn't even a viable option yet.

Not less than breeder and thorium reactors that people need to push forward as soon as proposing NP as an acceptable solution, because in its current form it is not.

I said that my main sources are WHO and UNSCEAR, they are published on the web:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

Apart from thyroid cancer (which is non fatal and treatable, unlike coal mining accidents), there was no statistically significant increase

Well, of course, if we don't count the cancers for which there was an increase, there was no increase. But the point is that there *was* a major spike of thyroid cancers in the Ukraine and Belarus. Fortunately, as you say, those cancers are rarely lethal - doesn't mean they don't exist though. Here is what the WHO estimates. That's a quote, if you're in a hurry:

In the first few months after the accident, radiation dose exposures to the thyroid received were particularly high in children and adolescents living in Belarus, Ukraine and the most affected regions of the Russian Federation, and in those who drank milk with high levels of radioactive iodine. By 2005, more than 6,000 thyroid cancer cases had been diagnosed in this group. It is most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers are attributable to radioiodine intake. Furthermore, it is expected that increases in thyroid cancer incidence due to the Chernobyl accident will continue for many more years, although long-term increases are difficult to quantify.

The suicide rate in China is 13.9 per 100,000 people, at least in 1999 - http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/chin.pdf (and that number is the government one considered a lowball by some). Foxconn had 14 suicides in 2010 but employed 920,000 people. Giving a rate of 1.5 per 100,000. Making Foxconn workers 10 times less likely to commit suicide than the general population.

Somehow you think that's a bad thing? Do you hate Chinese people or something?

France Telecom's rate was 15.3 compared to 14.7 for the general population. Sure higher, but they only have 102,000 employees so it's higher by 1 extra suicide per 16 years.

You think that's the end of the world too?

Quick calculation based on statistics

2% traffic accidents, 1.5% suicide, 1% violence, .6% falls, .6% drowning, .6% poisoning, .5% fire, .3% war, .3% alcohol/drug.
This gives a total of 7.4% of the total death rate. Total death rate of 916 per 100k * .074 gives a death rate of 68 per 100k.

That gives an average lifespan of 1470 years.

I was surprised by the death statistics. People worry so much and spend so many resources on things that are low on the list.

Actually, meds are often counterfeited.

From the link:

1. Products without active ingredients, 32.1%;
2. Products with incorrect quantities of active ingredients, 20.2%;
3. Products with wrong ingredients, 21.4%,
4. Products with correct quantities of active ingredients but with fake packaging, 15.6%;
5. Copies of an original product, 1%; and
6. Products with high levels of impurities and contaminants, 8.5%.

When you solve malaria, you will now cut the death rate. That will put pressure on the local community. LOADS of it. Right now, the reason why Malaria spread so quickly and easily is because mosquitoes carry it from one person to another. They are right next to each other. Once malaria is cured, then another disease will step right up there because more ppl will occupy the same space, but with the same amount of money to solve issues. Actually less overall as well as less per person. Once it is realized by gates that he screwed up, he will not want to solve the next symptom..

I don't think you understand the drain on resources that malaria is. While many do die from malaria, most do not. Most are just chronically sick, and unless you are going to advocate shooting them in the head, these current chronically sick people are a much bigger drain on the entire social structure than the increased costs associated with fewer deaths due to malaria.

Have a read:
http://www.rbm.who.int/cmc_upload/0/000/015/363/RBMInfosheet_10.htm

"Annual economic growth in countries with high malaria transmission has historically been lower than in countries without malaria. Economists believe that malaria is responsible for a ‘growth penalty' of up to 1.3% per year in some African countries. When compounded over the years, this penalty leads to substantial differences in GDP between countries with and without malaria and severely restrains the economic growth of the entire region.

The direct costs of malaria include a combination of personal and public expenditures on both prevention and treatment of the disease. Personal expenditures include individual or family spending on insecticide treated mosquito nets (ITNs), doctors' fees, anti-malarial drugs, transport to health facilities, support for the patient and sometimes an accompanying family member during hospital stays. Public expenditures include spending by government on maintaining health facilities and health care infrastructure, publicly managed vector control, education and research. In some countries with a heavy malaria burden, the disease may account for as much as 40% of public health expenditure, 30-50% of inpatient admissions, and up to 50% of outpatient visits.

The indirect costs of malaria include lost productivity or income associated with illness or death. This might be expressed as the cost of lost workdays or absenteeism from formal employment and the value of unpaid work done in the home by both men and women. In the case of death, the indirect cost includes the discounted future lifetime earnings of those who die.

Malaria has a greater impact on Africa's human resources than simple lost earnings. Although difficult to express in dollar terms, another indirect cost of malaria is the human pain and suffering caused by the disease. Malaria also hampers children's schooling and social development through both absenteeism and permanent neurological and other damage associated with severe episodes of the disease.

The simple presence of malaria in a community or country also hampers individual and national prosperity due to its influence on social and economic decisions. The risk of contracting malaria in endemic areas can deter investment, both internal and external and affect individual and household decision making in many ways that have a negative impact on economic productivity and growth."

The flu existed before 1918, and the strains mutate all the time. Not only can a dangerous variety happen again, the risk is real enough for the WHO to closely monitor how flu strains develop worldwide.

I understand how we could determine biological sex of the kids that go with the finger markings but I'm not really sure how we determined gender... http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/

You cannot quantify health. In fact you have a hard time even defining health

Then tell the World Health Organization to stop trying to do it