Epidemic of war deaths.Epidemic of war deaths Although medical research often addresses the causes of homicide, suicide and other "private" human-caused deaths, it rarely addresses the more "public" deaths of war. But the scale of such deaths in the 20th century is comparable to the scale of deaths in prior centuries due to epidemic diseases Noun 1. epidemic disease - any infectious disease that develops and spreads rapidly to many people pest, pestilence, plague - any epidemic disease with a high death rate infectious disease - a disease transmitted only by a specific kind of contact , observes Richard Rhodes Richard Lee Rhodes (b. July 4, 1937) is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and most recently, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Cambridge; coeducational; chartered 1861, opened 1865 in Boston, moved 1916. It has long been recognized as an outstanding technological institute and its Sloan School of Management has notable programs in business, in the Aug. 5 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association is an international peer-reviewed general medical journal, published 48 times per year by the American Medical Association. JAMA is the most widely circulated medical journal in the world. . Since 1700, wars have claimed more than 100 million lives worldwide, and more than 90 percent of these deaths occurred in the 20th century, Rhodes says. The ratio of civilians to combatants in the death toll has also increased steadily: Historically, about 50 percent of war-related deaths were civilian--but by the 1970s, civilians accounted for 73 percent of war deaths, and in the 1980s so far, the figure has risen to 85 percent, he says. Rhodes defines war as an armed conflict including one or more governments and causing the death of 1,000 or more people per year. Health professionals should monitor and report this neglected mortality as "a first step toward a remedy to man-made death man-made death Ethics Death that occurs by acts of man, which may be divided into civilian forms–MVAs, smoking, AIDS, accidents, eg, Bhopal and Chernobyl, possibly also, induced abortions, and non-civilian forms, related to war or totalitarianism. , the most terrible scourge of the 20th century," he concludes. |
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