No one is killed by the environment.
In “‘Green’ diseases kill 650 people in UAE every year”, Emirate 24-7 reports:
Despite being lower than the global standard, the environmental diseases are still a major contributor to premature mortality in the UAE, according to the latest study.
There are nearly an average 650 deaths per annum in the UAE due to ambient air pollution – a leading contributor to premature mortality, study by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers showed…
Eric & Loinell: I’m glad that you both pointed this out. We have always lived in a hostile environment and the greatest theat to human health is the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The next greatest threat is ludite scare “studies”.
Actually, the data points to the fact that being born is 100% lethal as in “no one escapes life, alive.” This applies to anyone who breaths or who doesn’t breath let alone those who breath so called “polluted air”. Life style, diet, medical treatment, or whatever doesn’t change the primary fact that men are mortal! Hence, no matter what environmental factor one selects to study, there will be deaths associated with it simply because men do not live forever. The challenge then is giving proof that any one particular environmental factor, directly and in particular, caused the deaths associated with the given factor studied. To say simply the death count was more than expected is not enough. You must also prove that your expectations were also correct and not merely “reasonable” which usually means that the expectation was consistent with the researcher’s preconceived notions of how the participants would behave in the study.
I would point out the huge number of studies in almost all fields that turn on a result that was not as expected. Could it not be that the problem is in the way we formulate expectations? Especially considering how much of the time we get them wrong? It is not that the results are surprising and our expectations correct, our expectation was wrong and it should be admitted that they were wrong. Why would one “expect” any other result than your expectations are no better than a cracked crock filled with warm soft brown stuff? The reported experiment compared measurements to ill founded and wrong expectations and tells us nothing but that the expectations were in fact wrong – which, on deeper analysis, we should have known before we even started the experiment.
The environment is the leading cause of death everywhere in the world. Deaths from water: countless. Deaths from gravity: even more than that. Deaths from natural bacteria, viruses and parasites: possibly the worst culprits. Deaths from starvation and malnutrition: horrendously rife. I could go on. There’s do doubt about it. The environment kills. And they’re all ‘green’ deaths.