Public Health Priorities

Our sense of public policy priorities is shaped, to a large extent, by what we hear in the media and from the political platforms of our elected representatives.  This has great societal significance as it determines what does, and does not, receive public funding in terms of basic scientific research.

While death does not exhaust the potential indicators/measures of how severe different public health risks are, it is a good starting place for comparing the magnitude of public health predicaments when we cannot solve all these problems at the same time and when resources are limited.  

Below is an intellectual exercise.  I leave it to the reader to discern for herself what the lesson to be learned from this exercise is.  

Here is list of 5 serious public health threats that are responsible for non-trivial numbers of human deaths every single day in the world.  On this list is one cause of death that will be responsible for the majority of the deaths of those who will ever read this post.  And yet this same cause of death is also the only one that you will likely not have heard mentioned in any news or social media post you have read in the past year.  

(1) Death from cancer.

(2) Death from climate change.

(3) Death from COVID-19.

(4) Death from violence/war.

(5) Death from senescence.

Cheers, 

Colin