Hacker News Reader

Comment by eeZah7Ux | Hacker News Reader

No.

Example: If a person made to ingest something that leads to immediate cardiac or respiratory failure we call it "poisoned to death".

Same for "being stabbed" rather than "cardiac failure due to blood loss"

View on HN

Those are causes of death.

ICD-10 has X85 "Assault by drugs, medicaments and biological substances" and X99 "Assault by sharp object". [1]

But it is unprecedented (AFAIK) to specify an external cause that is so far removed from the point of death.

E.g. assuredly people have died from the long-term effects of tanning, but "sun tan" is not considered to be a cause of a death.

[1] http://apps.who.int/classifications/apps/icd/icd10online2005...

British law is not medical coding. Misadventure isn't a medical code and could cover many of the bizarre ones like whale ingestion.

OK, what about lead poisoning? An environmental hazard, especially effects children, preventable, mostly affects poor folks and developing nations. This seems like it's pretty analogous.

But she lived in that street for years. Just like someone might have eaten cheeseburgers for years and died of a heart attack. You don’t say that someone died from chronic cheeseburger ingestion.

Not being snarky, but perhaps we should. It wouldn't be untrue. When people drink their livers to death we often say they died of alcohol abuse even if we note they died of liver failure - seems reasonable if someone ate tons of cheeseburgers we could say they died of cheeseburger abuse etc.

It's a bit dramatic, but could also be useful?

I'm definitely in agreement that we should say people died from alcohol overdose at least, maybe then people will take it seriously,

There weren’t legal limits on cheeseburger ingestion, like their was for air pollution. This death was preventable, and not the child’s fault.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com