1) Medical mistakes. This counts many old and sick people, who would have died soon anyway. They succumb to the mistake because they are old and sick. There are not 1/4 million perfectly healthy people who go in for a checkup and get fatally poisoned by a doc.

2) 2nd hand smoke. Big debates here on causality. That # is bogus.

3) Lack of health care. So vague, what does this mean. Ambulance arrived too late. Untreated diabtes? what.

What it doesn’t factor.

Lives lost due to slower economic growth caused by harmful leftwing policies.

If you can give bogus estimates of 2nd hand smoke than why not make up bogus estimates for drugs not invented due to overly punitive trial lawyers. Or how about # of deaths due to “evil” matriarchy forcing men to take all the dangerous jobs (construction, cops, firemen, soldiers, etc). What else can better explain women living longer than a paranoid conspiracy?

..

General principle of putting risks in perspective is a good idea. Course, a left anti-war site, is gonna put it in some lefty perspective. Surprised they didn’t come up with some # of deaths due to a lack of universal pre-school or a federal “living wage” law.

@Dan: Cancer and heart disease aren’t thinking enemies, but big pharma, the meat industry, the dairy industry, and the food and beverage industry are.

@feeblemind: Age-adjusted cancer and heart disease rates vary from country to country. As middle age approaches, a fear of cancer and heart disease do set amongst Americans who start popping statins to lower cholesterol and an assortment of supplements to ward off aging. Even young Americans are starting to catch this fear of aging. I read a couple of health blogs, and there are people in their twenties throwing money away on expensive, unproven supplements to zap those millions of free radicals snatching electrons from our cells every day.

RE: economic comparisons between spending on the war against terrorism and health care expenditures on preventable chronic diseases – my guess is that health spending would win hands-down.

@Dan: As sinister as McDonald’s might seem, Big Macs don’t think.

@Kurt9 who said “Finally you guys have pointed out something that makes abolute [sp.] sense to me. ” “Finally” Kurt?After nearly 2500 posts? ;)

@Sunbin: Yeah we know the site is slow. Actually it isn’t the site but the database, which is on a slow server. Still waiting for a fix on that from our host. Sorry.

my hypothesis is that the spending on terrorism is disproportionally high, and that it means the terrorist won. they were able to inflict a cost more than what they really did should generate. mr bush fell into their trap.

Forget about “dirty” bombs. The effects of these are mainly economic. If a dirty bomb goes off near where you are and you have the sense to walk out of the area within an hour or so, your lifetime chances of cancer will not be much higher than normal. There are also ways to “radiation harden” oneself. Anyone who is on a ‘life extension” regimen (Co-Q10, Vitamins A-C-E, resveratrol, Alpha Lipoic Acid) is already radiation hardened to a certain extent!

The main effect of a dirty bomb (radiological device) is the plumeting real estate values in the area that is hit, which means the main targets will be expensive real estate urban areas, like Manhattan.

Since 9/11, I have travelled extensively by air (domestically and to Asia). I almost never think about terrorism. I think more about the aging process than I do terrorism, which is why I am interested in stuff like SENS (www.sens.org).