Can you add years to your life?

 

I wrote an article recently about reduction in peoples’ Longevity due to  Covid-19. This was in Hindi along with an English version. You can visit https://hindimestem.blogspot.com/2022/10/blog-post.html to read it. If you do not read Hindi, you can skip the first half and go to the English version. The loss of years of life suffered by the victims of Covid-19 are shocking! Some of the causes of these high death rates are equally shocking. Noteworthy is the unreliable information on networks about vaccines. Most of the Covid deaths were of people who had not taken the necessary vaccination.

Let me move on to talk about the risks of alcohol consumption. A report from the prestigious CDC in the US Alcohol and Cancer Risk Fact Sheet - NCI says:

“Based on data from 2009, an estimated 3.5% of cancer deaths in the United States (about 19,500 deaths) were alcohol related”.

It also says
“In fact, a recent study that included data from more than 1,000 alcohol studies and data sources, as well as death and disability records from 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016, concluded that the optimal number of drinks to consume per day to minimize the overall risk to health is zero”.  

However, the shibboleth continues to be propagated that it is okay to have “two drinks for a man, and one for a woman, per day”.

What is the increase in cancer risk for a person taking one drink every day? It is considerable. The British  Medical Journal  (https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3944/rr-3 ) says: In fact the main characteristic of alcohol is it is a human carcinogen (Class 1) even at a low level.

The magnitude of the problem can be understood by looking at the number of cancer deaths per year in the US.  The US National Institute for Cancer had reported in 2020 as follows:

In 2020, an estimated 1,806,590 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 606,520 people will die from the disease. Visit Cancer Statistics - NCI

Heart Diseases and Blood Pressure

• An estimated 17.9 million people died from Cardiovascular Diseases in 2019, representing 32% of all global deaths. Of these deaths, 85% were due to heart attack and stroke. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) (who.int)

• If you’re age 40 or older, or if you’re at higher risk for high blood pressure, get your blood pressure checked once a year
  Get Your Blood Pressure Checked - MyHealthfinder | health.gov

Let me move on to the last topic in this article: air pollution. A report of the World Health Organization says that 4.2 million deaths per year are caused by air pollution Ambient (outdoor) air pollution (who.int)  That is the 2016 estimate. What do you think? Would it have gone down in the following years?

The action item for this topic is to look up air pollution data for the last six months. (Do a browser search for

Air Quality Index Your-city-name Your-Country-Name

Example: Air Quality Index Bengaluru India

                One of the search results returned is

                Bangalore Air Quality Index (AQI) : Real-Time Air Pollution ).

If you find that you are living in high pollution area, pack up and leave! Find a place that offers you a safer atmosphere! You don't want to be one of the 4.2 million in the near future!

Srinivasan Ramani

   

  

 

The victory of the Sapiens

Photo: Via Wikimedia, Author: www.vperemen.com / CC BY-SA

My cousin and his wife, living in the US, had bought tickets to come to India on the 23^rd March 2020. Then came the deluge, what my cousin called the pralaya. Visit YouTube for a visualization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9D5sqgqEYA , but don’t take it literally. What descended on us this time was what our prime minister correctly named a MahAmArI, a plague! 

Widespread disease and death is not a stranger to India. Tuberculosis has been killing over 200,000 Indians every year over the last few years. 

What is new now in the case of Covid-19? A worldwide response based on a few widely accepted ideas. One powerful idea is that of the germ theory of disease, in this case that the infection is caused by a virus. The other is an idea of a very fast and exponential spread of infection. The idea that the disease could spread even ten times within two or three weeks. That it could kill hundreds of thousands in a month or two. Such evidence-based understanding of a pandemic has been rare in the population as a whole. 

The author Yuval Noah Harari has argued that only humans are capable of cooperation on the large scale and in a flexible manner, including cooperation with strangers. The use of sophisticated language for communicating a variety of ideas no doubt makes this possible. The worldwide modification of behavior, including lockdown on a very large scale, social distancing, use of masks and frequent handwashing with soap have not been adopted as fast anywhere earlier as they took place over the last few months. They were never as effective. The cooperation went beyond all forms of tribalism and nationalism. The phenomenon clearly demonstrated what Harari had described.

Social engineering has succeeded where genetic engineering is asking for 18 months to produce a usable vaccine!

Is this a turning point in human history? What can we achieve if we perfect this technique, communicating with people, persuading them to do work together to achieve a common goal? 

Can we defeat an enemy like tuberculosis? It is a disease with strong socio-economic dimensions. It does not yield to any simple treatment with one or two medicines. Human commitment and social care would probably be essential to defeat it.

I have a glimmer of hope, that Indo-Sapiens will at last be able to do something in this direction.

Srinivasan Ramani