Bloomberg School of Pubic Health

Around May, 2012 Medical News Today reported online that in 2010 a careful survey estimated there were about seven and a half million (they used the number 7.6 M) deaths worldwide among children under 5 years of age. Of those 18% were caused by pneumonia, the single highest cause. Let's back up a step so I can say that this sounds to me like a surprisingly small number. Suppose we have 6.5 billion people. The Brits call a billion a thousand million, and for good reason, since that's what it is. Always a pleasant surprise to catch Britain, that island of fuddy-duddies, doing something right. They can't even talk right. A Brit himself recently described his sceptred isle as the "land of the limp paycheck." Limp here means small, so don't think of any anatomical items being limp, even if you do have a dirty mind, and even if limp in that setting would also mean something was small. Back to the billions of people on Earth. Let's just say we are 6000 million in all. How many are under 5? Say 10%, and I suspect it may be less, or 600 M small children. If 7.6 M died, that's just over 1%. Right? Sure. Almost 99% of all vulnerable babies, toddlers, and 2-3-4 year-olds lived through the year. I wouldn't have guessed the survival rate was that good in Marin County, Calif, much less Botswana. Seems like an amazing success rate. I haven't checked the studies, but l say with blowhard confidence, as I sit here at age 63, that 99% of all us age 63 folk who started the year will not be around to finish it. By no means. This 7.6 million is, by the way, down by 2 million since 2000. Of these, as I said, 18% were caused by pneumonia, while 14% were the result of a complication of preterm birth, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in The Lancet, per Medical News Today. Diarrhea is the third leading cause of deaths among very young children. Wasn't it the Bloomberg School of Public Health that recently put out a brochure labelling itself as the "School of Pubic Health?" I thought of dropping out that "l" from public health years ago, so advanced I am. The School's PR lady was aghast, but the rest of us thought it was hilarious and wrote in for copies of the original brochure. First the best of all the game, right?