Risk Equivalencing

===> Understanding Risk by Bernard Cohen, 1990 <===

 Much good reading at the link shown above.  For example: Driving one hundred miles has an equivalent effect on average life expectancy as smoking four cigarettes (about 40 minutes reduction) and every extra pound of body weight reduces our life expectancy by an average of about a month.

While roughly 140,000 people are killed each year in job related accidents .PLUS. job related illnesses, it is even more dangerous to be unemployed and live in poverty.

The reader should be cautious about the assumed direction of causality.  Is life expectancy negatively impacted by being unemployed or might there be a shared, underlying cause like substance abuse, mental illness or poor health or obesity causing job loss and early mortality?

In some many cases there is correlation between the factors listed below.  Race, education level, smoking cigarettes, living in poverty, obesity, employment status, marital status and suboptimal access to medical care all have positive coefficients of correlation.  One cannot simply add LLE numbers.

Aside: Shepherds used to separate causes of lamb mortality into many causes but recently "lumped" the three biggest causes of lamb mortality into Starvation/Mismothering/Exposure.  Mismothering is the glue that joins the complex.  A good mother will bond with her lambs, will call to them and actively encourage them to fill their bellies with milk.  A good mother will stay with her lambs and shield them from weather if it is not possible to lead them to a more sheltered place.  It is academic to try to decide if a lamb might have survived a cold rain IF it had a full belly.  A good mother makes those decisions a moot point.

I propose that somebody develop a catchy phrase to describe the early mortality of antisocial people.  The best I can do is Western Culture Renunciation syndrome.  Avoid education, avoid work, avoid marriage, wallow in recreational drugs, sit on your butt....basically flip Western Culture the bird...and die young.

End Aside

LOSS OF LIFE EXPECTANCY (LLE) DUE TO VARIOUS RISKS

TABLE 1
	Activity or risk*	LLE (days)
	Living in poverty	3500
	Being male (vs. female)	2800
	Cigarettes (male)	2300
	Heart disease*	2100
	Being unmarried	2000
	Being black (vs. white)	2000
	Socioeconomic status low	1500
	Working as a coal miner	1100
	Cancer*	980
	30-lb overweight	900
	Grade school dropout	800
	Sub-optimal medical care*	550
	Stroke*	520
	15-lb overweight	450
	All accidents*	400
	Vietnam army service	400
	Living in Southeast (SC,MS,GA,LA,AL)	350
	Mining construction (accidents only)	320
	Alcohol*	230
	Motor vehicle accidents	180
	Pneumonia, influenza*	130
	Drug abuse*	100
	Suicide*	95
	Homicide*	90
	Air pollution*	80
	Occupational accidents	74
	AIDS*	70
	Small cars (vs. midsize)	60
	Married to smoker	50
	Drowning*	40
	Speed limit: 65 vs. 55 miles per hour*	40
	Falls*	39
	Poison + suffocation + asphyxiation*	37
	Radon in homes*	35
	Fire, burns*	27
	Coffee: 2 cups/day	26
	Radiation worker, age 18-65	25
	Firearms*	11
	Birth control pills	5
	All electricity nuclear (UCS)*	1.5
	Peanut butter (1 Tbsp./day)	1.1
	Hurricanes, tornadoes*	1
	Airline crashes*	1
	Dam failures*	1
	Living near nuclear plant	0.4
	All electricity nuclear (NRC)*	0.04

^*Asterisks indicate averages over total U.S. population; others refer to those exposed.