Starvation death hoax; population control for autos?
Usually, when dealing with the question of population growth vs. food production, one encounters the preposterous claims of the Ehrlichs (Anne and Paul), This pair continues to claim, in the absence of any credible evidence, that hundreds of millions have died of hunger and starvation around the world during the past two decades.
A new wrinkle in the hunger/starvation death game, however, recently surfaced in a column in The Sun paper of Baltimore, Maryland, where columnist Jo Campbell twice asserted that “every 53 minutes an American child dies of hunger.”1
One death every 53 minutes equates to 27 deaths per day, or nearly 10,000 (actually 9,855) per year. But the latest US mortality statistics, just released by the Centers for Disease Control in June, report that in 1995 the total number of deaths from all causes among children between the ages 1-14, was just 14,989.2
(We are taking the age range 1-14 years because infants below age one generally die from congenital problems and birth traumas, usually within a month of birth, while above age 14 children are old enough to solve their own hunger problems, even if they have to steal to do so.)
Of the 14,989 deaths enumerated by the CDC, 5,824 were caused by accidents, 1,673 by cancers, and 1,144 died from congenital anomalies.
Another 1,014 died from homicides (a sad reflection on our violent society), while cardiovascular diseases took 703, various infectious and parasitic diseases killed 631, 399 succumbed to HIV and AIDS, and 337 committed suicide.
Pneumonia and influenza caused the deaths of 284 children, pulmonary diseases killed 180, 137 died from septicemia, 122 from anemia, and 118 from conditions (mostly birth traumas) originating in the prenatal period. Adding up these 13 major causes of childhood deaths, one notes that they account for all but 2,423 of the total number of childhood deaths. No other cause of death accounts for as much as 100 deaths.
Despite columnist Campbell’s assertions, there is simply no room whatever in the official U.S. mortality statistics to support her claim of nearly 10,000 childhood “hunger deaths” annually.
Population control for autos?
The US Department of Transportation recently announced that since 1969, the vehicle population of the United States has grown six times faster than the human population.
Since the time of the first vehicle survey in 1969, to 1995, when the latest survey was conducted, the number of vehicles has risen by 144 percent, to 176 million, At the same time, the number of drivers also increased, but only by 72 percent. Formerly, drivers used to outnumber cars by 30 percent; now the two figures are equal,
Also, just like people, autos are lasting longer than ever with the number of cars 10 or more years old having increased nearly seven-fold, to 52.5 million, from 7.8 million. Paul Ehrlich, where are you when you’re really needed?
(“Number of cars in United States now equals the number of drivers,” The Sun, 21 September, 4A, reprinted from The New York Times .)
