The Optimism Bias: This is why our warnings on cigarette packages go unheeded. Yes smoking kills 6 million people per year. Smokers believe that it will kill the other guy.
Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. The tragic aspect of these deadly diseases is that they could all be cured, I do believe, if we had sufficient funding.
I have no cancer. I have four illnesses, but they are not fatal.
Patients with fatal diseases are fighting for their lives every day while real, meaningful, life-extending treatments sit on the shelf just beyond their reach.
Most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but ... none was as specific as old age.
Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.
In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.