One often hears discussions about whether there are more people dying young today, toddlers, children, teens, young adults, young marrieds, middle-aged marrieds who are diagnosed with cancer and other illnesses, in addition to "accidents" (car, fire, drowning), or not.
I am referring to the constant tzaros we hear and read about, the emails requesting Tehillim. The huge Tehillim lists. The ads and tzedaka requests for families that are suffering from tragedies.
So first, we have to decide what period of time we're comparing our times to! To life in Europe? To life in America?
1900-1950?
1950-1980?
the past 30 years?
Of course life expectancy has gone up and today we expect all live births to result in live adults when long ago (though not SO long ago), before vaccinations, many babies and children died! It was common for a woman to have many live births, let's say 13, but only have 5 survive childhood!
So I'm not talking about comparing our days to back then.
I'm more interested in knowing whether things have changed since say, the 1950's. I'm inclined to believe that it's because communications today are so advanced that we hear more than we used to. When a kalla was in a car accident or became seriously sick years ago, it was just a local issue, but now, people all over the world are hearing about many more tzaros through frum news websites and emails.
May we soon know of no more sorrow.
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http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/medical/breastcancer/story/2011-09-15/Breast-cancer-rates-increase-worldwide-Study-Finds/50414632/1
ReplyDeleteaccording to some studies, the worldwide rates of some cancers are increasing. This may be due to lifestyle practices or environmental issues. It might also be that because people today survive illnesses that might have killed them at a younger age in previous generations, (such as infections), as they age, their DNA repair is not as efficient and therefore the possibility of cancer becomes more likely (chas v'sholem, may no Jew suffer from it).
That is coupled with a more efficient way of tracking disease so that statistics are more readily available.