Mortality

On Monday we discussed, in class, mortality. After the lecture, I began to think about all the people in the world that die and even though we have good data collection from death certificates and such there are still many people that die without being known. The world has become so desensitized to death and horrible things happen in the world every day. Many healthy people start and continue bad habits even after seeing harmful effects. Smoking is known to be bad, there is tiny writing on each pack of cigarettes from the Surgeon General stating it’s bad and a plethora of statistics, but people continue to smoke until they become one of the statistics.
It's so interesting to see the statistics on the causes of death, but what was surprising to me was the fact that doctors and medical examiners can alter the specific causes like suicide to something more broad like unintentional injuries upon the request from loved ones. The numbers seem so hard to wrap your head around when talking about national mortality statistics, but when they are put into a population sample of 100,000, as seen in class, it is an easier number to wrap your brain around. It also puts into perceptive how fatal several diseases can be, like pancreatic cancer. Fortunately, pancreatic cancer is not see too often in our population, but unfortunately it is extremely deadly.
I would enjoy studying more about morality in epidemiology because I feel like we could understand so much from the deaths of individuals in our own nation and around the world. More research in this area may help us find cures to diseases we did not think we ever could!