A sexually transmitted disease
With a 100% mortality rate
It is strange how we, in this country anyway, increasingly talk as if death were optional. As if the alternative to dying of lung cancer from smoking were not dying at all. Tests of the value of new medical procedures measure mortality & newspapers talk about numbers of deaths prevented rather than numbers of deaths postponed
But look at the mortality figures & you will see that the death of anyone under 50 has indeed become a pretty rare event. And therefore news
This explains why, on at least 2 occasions last year Radio 5 Live carried, as items of national headline news, the deaths of children which did not involve murder, paedophilia or abduction. One child choked to death on a piece of apple, the other drowned in a river on a family day out
The death rate for children under a year old now runs at about 1 in 200. If you survive your first year your chance of dying wont be so high again until your late 50s
