The popularity of death studies

At Kean University, students are dying (as it were) to get into Norma Bowe’s class “Death in Perspective,” which has sometimes carried a three-year waiting list. images-2WSJ Online reports that “On one field trip to a local coroner’s office, Dr. Bowe’s students were shown three naked cadavers on metal tables. One person had died from a gunshot, the other from suicide and the third by drowning.

“The last corpse appeared overweight but wasn’t; he had expanded like a water balloon. A suspect in a hit-and-run case, he had fled the scene, been chased by police, abandoned his car and jumped into the Passaic River. On the autopsy table, he looked surprised, his mouth splayed open, as if he realized he had made a mistake. As the class clustered around, a technician began to carve his torso open. Some students gagged or scurried out, unable to stand the sight or the smell.

“This grim visit was just one of the excursions for Dr. Bowe’s class. Every semester, students also leave the campus in Union, New Jersey, to visit a cemetery, a maximum-security prison (to meet murderers), a hospice, a crematory and a funeral home, where they pick out caskets for themselves. The homework is also unusual: Students are required to write goodbye letters to dead loved ones and to compose their own eulogies and wills.

“Sure, it’s morbid. But graduates of Dr. Bowe’s death class and others like it across the U.S. often come away with an important skill: the ability to talk frankly about death. Continue reading “The popularity of death studies”

Court to address death penalty and mental disability

The Supreme Court said Monday it would consider taking another step toward limiting the use of the death penalty, this time by trying to clarify the legal standard for who is ineligible for the ultimate punishment because of mental disability, reports the LA Times.images

At issue is whether states such as Florida may disqualify anyone who scores above 70 on an IQ test. A score below 70 generally indicates mental disability.

“The justices agreed to hear the case of Freddie Hall, a Florida death row inmate who killed two people in 1978, but who was described as mentally disabled when he was a child and was deemed to be mentally retarded by the judge who sentenced him to die. Three years ago, Florida prosecutors said Hall had scored a 71 on a Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test and therefore could be executed for his crimes. At other times he scored 73 and 80.

“His case figures to be the most important death penalty dispute decided during this court term. During the last decade, the court has limited the use of the death penalty by excluding those who were younger than 18 at the time of the crime or who suffered from a significant mental disability. But until now, the court has not intervened to clarify who qualifies for an exemption based on a mental disability. “It’s been 11 years, and this issue is still not settled,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Continue reading “Court to address death penalty and mental disability”

White women live shorter lives in the south

Everything about Crystal’s life was ordinary, except for her death, begins a story in today’s American Prospect.images

“She is one of a demographic—white women who don’t graduate from high school—whose life expectancy has declined dramatically over the past 18 years. These women can now expect to die five years earlier than the generation before them. It is an unheard-of drop for a wealthy country in the age of modern medicine. Throughout history, technological and scientific innovation have put death off longer and longer, but the benefits of those advances have not been shared equally, especially across the race and class divides that characterize 21st–century America. Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It’s killing them.

“The journal Health Affairs reported the five-year drop in August. The article’s lead author, Jay Olshansky, who studies human longevity at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a team of researchers looked at death rates for different groups from 1990 to 2008. White men without high-school diplomas had lost three years of life expectancy, but it was the decline for women like Crystal that made the study news. Previous studies had shown that the least-educated whites began dying younger in the 2000s, but only by about a year. Olshansky and his colleagues did something the other studies hadn’t: They isolated high-school dropouts and measured their outcomes instead of lumping them in with high-school graduates who did not go to college.

“The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude, Russian men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when they began drinking more and taking on other risky behaviors. Although women generally outlive men in the U.S., such a large decline in the average age of death, from almost 79 to a little more than 73, suggests that an increasing number of women are dying in their twenties, thirties, and forties. “We actually don’t know the exact reasons why it’s happened,” Olshansky says. “I wish we did.” Continue reading “White women live shorter lives in the south”

Art and tragic events

imagesThe Economist gave the United States a whole weekend to mourn the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre before telling the entire nation to suck it up. “Those of us who view the events remotely … unless we start to evince a newfound appetite for gun-control measures to prevent future mass slayings, are doing little more than displaying and enjoying our own exalted strickenness,” writes one M.S. “This is an activity at which we, as a culture, excel.”

Why, thanks, anonymous writer, for telling an entire nation its feelings are unproductive. I am reminded of Eddie Izzard’s bit about St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians—and the Corinthians’ response: “Dear Paul, fuck off. Who are you? Why do you keep sending us letters? You arrogant bastard, writing a letter to an entire city! What do you want us to do, put this on a board or something? Just fuck off!… Love and kisses, The Corinthians.”

On the other end of the spectrum, there was the Washington Post‘s Style section, which, earlier this week, asked its arts critics to “meditate on the role of the arts in coping with grief” and “share works that have resonated with them in such times.” Theodor Adorno once said that poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. The Post appears to be asking its critics to hand out artworks as antidepressants. Continue reading “Art and tragic events”

Death penalty diminishing worldwide

Iraq executed almost twice as many people last year compared to the year before, while India and Pakistan resumed executions after abandoning the practice for years, global human rights group Amnesty International said on Tuesdayimages-1

In a story appearing in today’s Al Jazeera, “Amnesty said China still led the top five countries carrying out executions, followed by Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Despite setbacks in several countries, the group said it was encouraged by overall signs of progress in the global trend toward ending the death penalty.

In the US, nine states carried out executions in 2012, compared to 13 in the previous year. Continue reading “Death penalty diminishing worldwide”

Death by asteroid

imgres-1Most people in the U.S. woke up to a spectacular sight this morning: videos from Russian dashboard cameras showing a fireball in the sky crashing down to the Earth, reports Wired Science.  “The 15-meter meteorite impacted the atmosphere and exploded above the Chelyabinsk region of central Russia, injuring an estimated 1,200 people and causing roughly 1 billion rubles ($33 million U.S.) in damage. It was the largest meteorite to hit the country in more than a century.

“It’s hard to know what’s stranger about the event. That a substantial meteorite hit the Earth on the same day as a 50-meter asteroid is making a record-breaking (and completely safe) close pass, that people have been thinking more and more about how to deflect potentially killer space rocks, or that we live in a day and age when dozens of videos of a fairly rare event can be uploaded to the internet and instantly seen worldwide. Continue reading “Death by asteroid”

Danger in the shower

“The other morning, I escaped unscathed from a dangerous situation. No, an armed robber didn’t break into my house, nor did I find myself face to face with a mountain lion during my bird walk. What I survived was my daily shower.”  Thus writes Jared Diamond, whose recent book The World Till Yesterday was recently released. Diamond makes some good points, a few of which are excerpted below:

“You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I’m 75.) Among my wife’s and my circle of close friends over the age of 70, one became crippled for life, one broke a shoulder and one broke a leg

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in falls on the sidewalk. One fell down the stairs, and another may not survive a recent fall.

“’Really!’ you may object. ‘What’s my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?’ My answer: Perhaps, but that’s not nearly good enough. Continue reading “Danger in the shower”

Bad habits cause more cancer in men

These days men die five years younger than women, typically expiring at 76  as women live to 81. For the longest time the leading reason was heart disease. But now things are changing. As todays’ Guarding reports:

“Men are 35% more likely to die

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from cancer than women, with men’s drinking and eating habits, late diagnosis and advances in breast cancer treatment cited for the stark differential.

An analysis of the most recent UK deaths from cancer found that 202 out of every 100,000 men died from cancer in 2010 compared with 147 per 100,000 women.

“When sex-specific forms of the disease are excluded, such as prostate, testicular and ovarian cancer, the gender gap is even wider, with men 67% more likely to die. And when only working age people are looked at men under 65 have a 58% greater chance of dying than women of the same age. The sexes’ respective likelihood of death varies depending on the type of cancer. Men are almost three times as likely as women to die of oesophageal cancer and almost twice as likely to die from liver cancer.

The figures come from a new report produced by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the Men’s Health Forum (MHF) and the National Cancer Intelligence Network, called “Excess cancer burden in men”, which is published on Tuesday at an MHF conference. It has prompted calls for men to adopt healthier lifestyles and the NHS to do more to spot cancer in men earlier.

“There are a variety of potential explanations for the difference. “The reasons for the increased risk of cancer in men versus women are not completely understood but experts believe that lifestyle is important. Men are more likely to drink alcohol and be overweight, and in the past they were more likely to smoke. All three are significant risk factors for a range of cancer types,” said a separate men’s cancer briefing, produced by CRUK and also released on Tuesday.

“Ciaran Devane, chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, said the stark difference was alarming. He highlighted late diagnosis as a key factor and cited the fact that 24% of men with prostate cancer visited their GP at least three times before their disease was identified, compared with 8% of women with breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Experience Survey. In 2011 CRUK estimated that 45% of all cancers in men could be prevented if men stopped smoking, ate a healthier diet, drank less and weighed less.”

 

For more, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/29/men-cancer-deaths-greater-women

 

Americans still favor death penalty

It’s widely known that the United States is one of the few nations in the world still using the death penalty.

No other nation in the Americas retains capital punishment. And only Belarus in Europe does. This week the U.S. Supreme Court rejected permanent stays on

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executions of the mentally ill. And a new survey shows 63% of the population still likes the idea of executions. Political division?  A culture of fear? The Gallup Organization reports that

“Americans’ support for the death penalty as punishment for murder has plateaued in the low 60s in recentyears, after several years in which support was diminishing. Sixty-three percent now favor the death penalty as the punishment for murder, similar to 61% in 2011 and 64% in 2010. Continue reading “Americans still favor death penalty”

Syrian deaths more than reported

imgres-2“The world already believed Syria’s civil war to be monstrous, with nearly 45,000 slain,” reports todays Wired DangerRoom. “But when the United Nations plunged into the disparate databases cataloging the victims, it discovered there had been an awful oversight. The true death toll was more like 60,000 people, the data-mining operation revealed. And even that elevated total is likely to be low.

“The brutal truth is that no one really knows how many Syrians have died in dictator Bashar Assad’s brutal crackdown: Warzone death estimates are notoriously imprecise. By its own admission, the death toll compiled by the human rights tech group Benetech, on behalf of the UN, is inaccurate. But its assessment has the virtue of specificity, a factor that preempts some of the doubts raised about mortality estimates in other warzones. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called the study “a work in progress, not a final product.” Continue reading “Syrian deaths more than reported”

U.S. gun deaths since Sandy Hook: 345

This recent statistic of 345 gun deaths is about the average for a two week period in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The number comes courtesy of Slate.com, which has just started an online project to track gun killings. As Slate announced today:

“Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at Slate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.

 

“That information is surprisingly hard to come by. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence

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, for example, has a tally atop its website of “people shot in America.” That number, though, is an estimate, based on the number of gun injuries and deaths recorded by the CDC in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which statistics are available. It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States. Continue reading “U.S. gun deaths since Sandy Hook: 345”