Death by Poverty
-To me, it looks like a modern-day holocaust. (With the whole world as the complicit (racist?) nazis). I'm talking about perhaps 100k deaths/day. (!)
Here's the
link to the story (from '05).
-(bigger picture) Death rate: Overall, around 100 people die every minute, for a total of 146,000 every day, all ages, all causes, around the world (That's 53.29M total human deaths a year). -forgot to document the source, sorry. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. Everyone dies. But...
-The 20,000 figure in the '05 article refers to the number who die of "extreme poverty."
That's 7.3M/year, (or about 13.79% of the 53M, mostly children).
(aside: what percentage of extreme poverty deaths are adult?)
-It's 4 years later. So the question becomes: Less or more? And how soon til Zero?
This article, from 2/17/07, says (only!) 18,000 children die of poverty daily (6.57M/yr) while
This website says 30,000 children die of poverty daily. That's 11M/year. (source?year?)
So who knows, right?
One is too many, of course. The world can rise to meet this basic need. Heck, maybe even Barack could.
more data:
-Wikipedia's article on 'death rate' says this about the year 2006:
"According to
Jean Ziegler (the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for 2000 to March 2008), mortality due to
malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 millions people, all causes of death combined, die each year. In 2006, more than 36 millions died of hunger, or diseases due to deficiencies in
micronutrients"
[1].
So we have various answers: 6.57M ('07)c, 7.3M ('05), 11M (?)c, 36M ('06),
with a c next to the figures that only count children.
-So how did 7.3M become 36M, in one year?? And how did 13.8% of death become 58%? What is it now, and why? Hunger is a painful way to die, I've heard. Maybe, to be technical, the two sources weren't measuring the same thing. Either way, death through poverty subtracts. All of us Make A "Difference" every day, it seems, through a near universal sweeping under the rug of this atrocity of a lack of compassion and action. Evil exists. Neglect and willfully abstaining from feeding children, in my view, is bad. 20k may have become 98,630 (36M/365) deaths a day, instead. I ask, is it really "all good"? In one year, a 5-fold increase in preventable death...and mostly children. Robot brain says: can...not...deal...must....watch...the office... Sure hope I'm not a part of the disease.
-Egads, brain. (Must...break....free...be...part...of....sol..u..tion)
Mr. Sachs thinks we might solve this over the next 15 years, by 2025.
-I'm officially declaring STARVATION to be priority one. I mean, duh. Ugh. I should be positive. Alright! Just do it! Sara just had me dance in the kitchen to American Boy by Estelle feat. Kanye West. Kind of a strange juxtaposition, there. Danse Macabre?
-With these kinds of facts, I just wonder if the supposedly sane aren't completely delusional. I mean, you can only operate under 'live and let die' up to a certain point, right? Why the hell can't we as a human race get our shit together?
One more:
Anup Shah,
Today, over 26,500 children died around the world, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Thursday, January 31, 2008
okay, two:
I think this is where he got his info:
From
a 2003 Johns Hopkins paper, as follows:
"More than 10 million children die each year, most from preventable causes and almost all in poor countries. Six countries account for 50% of worldwide deaths in children younger than 5 years, and 42 countries for 90%. The causes of death differ substantially from one country to another, highlighting the need to expand understanding of child health epidemiology at a country level rather than in geopolitical regions. Other key issues include the importance of undernutrition as an underlying cause of child deaths associated with infectious diseases, the effects of multiple concurrent illnesses, and recognition that pneumonia and diarrhoea remain the diseases that are most often associated with child deaths. A better understanding of child health epidemiology could contribute to more effective approaches to saving children's lives."
-The data is a bit fuzzy, I'll admit. The population of Nigeria is obscure, for example, and the stats fluctuate, and the most current counts probably aren't available.
Also from Wikipedia (Wikipedia needs internal consistency):
-Approximately 27 percent of children under 5 in developing world are malnourished, and in these developing countries, malnutrition claims about half of the 10 million deaths each year of children under 5.
-1 person dies every second as a result of hunger - 4000 every hour - 100 000 each day - 36 million each year - 58 % of all deaths (2001-2004 estimates).
[14][15][16]-1 child dies every 5 seconds as a result of hunger - 700 every hour - 16 000 each day - 6 million each year - 60% of all child deaths (2002-2008 estimates).
[17][18][19][20][21]-There were 923 million hungry people in the world in 2007, an increase of 80 million since 1990,
[10] despite the fact that the world already produces enough food to feed everyone - 6 billion people - and could feed the double - 12 billion people.
[11]-Wikipedia
link to Malnutrition.
-Here's a quote from the CIA factbook: "The addition of 80 million people each year to an already overcrowded globe is exacerbating the problems of pollution, desertification, underemployment, epidemics, and famine. Because of their own internal problems and priorities, the industrialized countries devote insufficient resources to deal effectively with the poorer areas of the world, which, at least from an economic point of view, are becoming further marginalized."
-The CIA also says the GWP (Global World Product) is 70.65T ppp (purchasing power parity), and that military spending is 2% of that, roughly....which would be, "roughly", 1.413T dollars. Wake up and stop avoiding all this shit! That is an humongous amount of measurable evil, in my view. Unless we really want to start saying that murder is good. Yes, I AM saying military expenditure = murder. I really don't want to hear that weapons systems don't kill people. They kill in two ways: opportunity cost, and in their usage. Militaries, bad. War, evil.
-Anyway, back to the main topic, a)hunger, b)extreme poverty, c)lack of micronutrients claim now, what...near 100k, or "just" 20k per day?
Does anyone care? Do the powers that be want military spending to result in some winnowing down of global overpopulation? All in the name of feeling militarily "strong" while bodies (and arms, I might add) rot, bloat, and weaken? Using CIA factbook data, I calculate 0.823% (est. '09 world death rate) of 6.76B (current pop.) is 55,634,800 dead per year. That's 152,424 dead/day (from all causes). But there's 137M births per year, for a net gain of 81.3652M new human souls on our island paradise called earth a year. An extra 222k/day. The CIA says, and I quote, "already overcrowded." Of course, I don't trust the CIA, necessarily. But it sounds right. Keeping in mind, however, that Hitler wanted liebensraum (living space) for his superior Aryans, which should set off some bells. Remember, 36,000,000 dead in 2006 from hunger or diseases resulting from micronutrient deficiency.
Hunger or Diseases Resulting from Micronutrient Deficiency. (H or Dr. from M.D.) How bout them apples. The holocaust murdered 6 million jews. This is 6 holocausts in one year. Mostly unreported. Plus, there's abortion. God damn. Okay, so it's only one holocaust, you got me.
So is overpopulation/the threat or sense of overpopulation...Is this a motive for institutional neglect, if not outright ill will? We must never lose our humanity. Or is it already in the lost and found box. We should look.
-How many children die from poverty now, like what percent? Anup Shaw's figure of 26,500 child deaths a day (up to what age? 5 or 14?) sums to 9,672,500 child deaths a year, like basically around 10m. So 17.3857% of all deaths are of children, at the moment.
-Also, what percentage of death is preventable? That would be an even larger number, including things like overeating and smoking and refraining from lifestyle change, for example from people not doing physical labor to clean up garbage and build sewers and all the rest.
-So I've got info from '03, '05, and '06. It's bad no matter how you slice it. Btw, I'm not saying we should be adding 90 or 100 million new souls per year to our planet, instead of just 80M. But we should commit to the survival and thriving of children, once born (and, I would add, once conceived). Large families (average family size, that is) become smaller after some threshold of income, I believe. Parents will have less kids if they can reliably trust in the survival of their offspring, I think, too. We can have our development, and living dead, too. I mean, effective lifesaving global policy, too.
I believe in being Sisyphean. No matter how absurd, pointless, futile things can seem, we must derive meaning from our endurance and willingness to keep rolling the ball up the hill. I will not be drugged into oblivion, and forced to watch crappy commercials and meaningless programming with laugh tracks telling me shitty jokes are actually funny, while paris is burning, or was it rome. Obviously, some of my stats are outdated. If it's not 100,000 dead per day, it's only 16,000. That's encouraging and hopeful, actually. There's a story there, lurking between the lines. Keep on truckin'. So there. Gr.
This post puts the 'inter' in internet. It serves as a lesson to double-check, and attempt to get the most current, internet statistics. 16k or a 100k deaths per day, it still really sucks. I'll use the secret and make my request to the universe: 1) No preventable death/everyone in good health 2)enjoyable and happy and comfortable, with minimal pain or suffering, life. And 3)Sustainability and wise governance. See, even God prays.
Barack is currently working on the economy, and has an ambitious agenda to enact appreciable change in education, energy, and healthcare. I hope he doesn't forget the ROW (rest of world), and especially the developing world, as part of his healthcare reform.
But wait, I should empower myself, I mean, I'm God and all. Let there be health! And it was so.
Is anyone on earth sane?
