@clive Great graphic, indeed! But hey, they're giving #diabetes proportional coverage.

Oh no, of course not, those numbers are inflated by the coverage about #ozempic.

@clive Skip the Xitter link and go straight to the referenced article here: https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death

(Edit: apparently doesn’t include the chart shown in the Xitter post).

@clive Suicide overlook traffic violence as a cause of death some time ago. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/

Just under 50k in 2023 vs around 40k to traffic violence.

The chart has traffic violence as 5x higher than suicide.

@clive

I don't think those numbers can be right. The infographic says that 7.6% of people die in road incidents, but Wikipedia says that only ten people per million die on the roads every year. If people live to 80 (and so they have 80 chances to become one of the 10ppm) then the proportion of people dying on the roads is 800ppm, which is 0.8%, which is one tenth of the claimed figure. I'm not saying road deaths don't matter, but I find Wikipedia's figure more believable than the one in the infographic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year

@clive

Is the purpose of media to report on causes of death?

@clive
I would like to see this chart, but with percentage of lost Quality Adjusted Life Years instead of percentage of deaths.

It would be a more realistic measurement of impact and bring suicides and accidents a bit more in line with press coverage.

@clive I agree with have a disjointed sense of personal risk (sharks etc), but disagree that these charts have anything to do with it.

1) It makes a lot of sense for various reasons to search for [cancer] or [suicide], probably not as much [heart disease]. Instead, people would search for things like [lower cholesterol] – was that lumped in those tiny blue bars up there?

2) Some causes of death are more newsworthy than others, and rightly so. 30–40% of people dying from cancer has kinda just been the way it is for many decades. Everyone knows cancer is bad; there's going to be some news coverage of shifts in frequency or new treatments and preventative measures, but what else would you expect to be in the news?

I don't get this idea that we should be collectively wringing our hands about things in proportion to death risk. e.g. of course I want to spend more time in political debates talking about terrorism or homicide than I do about diabetes; that's obvious, right?

FWIW I spend time roughly proportional to the leftmost chart on each cause when talking to my doctor.

@clive It’s interesting to explore #CausesOfDeath further, especially from a global perspective, here:

https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death

@clive As others have already said: It's *partly* understandable, maybe unavoidable. Everyone has to die of *something* eventually. So, an old person dying from a heart or respiratory disease or from cancer is not a news story in and of itself. A homicide or terrorist attack is.

I guess, the bigger problem is *how* the media coverage is done, if it helps inciting exaggerated panic and establishing policies that harm a lot of other peoples' rights while trying to prevent terrorism.