We're Number One!

This is fucking pathetic. Financial Times (01.08.08), via Jerome a Paris:

"More patients die in the US from diseases that could be treated by timely intervention than in any other leading industrialised country, a study by senior health academics showed on Monday.

A decade ago, the US had the fourth worst record among a group of 19 industrialised countries in terms of deaths per 100,000 people from diseases that are amenable to treatment."

US leads on deaths from treatable disease

"Over the succeeding five years, the number of such deaths in the US fell from 115 per 100,000 to 110. But other countries improved faster, leaving the US with the worst record, behind Portugal, Ireland and the UK, where the preventable death rate runs at 103 or 104 per 100,000."

"'If the US performed as well as the top three countries in the study' - France, with 65 deaths per 100,000, and Japan and Australia, both with 71 per 100,000 - 'there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year,' the authors write in the journal Health Affairs."