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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

It’s a little like terrorism. You can have tens of thousands of people die from cars, smoking and obesity. But if a fraction of that dies from terrorists the whole country changes.

If one child gets hurt from a slide or abducted by a stranger the whole country changes to avoid this risk but all the other risks are silently accepted.

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Absolutely. I did the math recently to come up with a comparison for how many people heart disease kills. Suppose the Columbine massacre had never stopped. Rather, all day, every day, the same rate of death kept happening as during the 49 minutes of the attack. You would need 5 of those continuous attacks ongoing at all times in order to be equivalent to heart disease in the US.

Does that account for likely years of life lost? If you die of heart disease at 65, that's many fewer years lost than someone getting killed at 15.

As gruesome/horrifying as these sorts of calculations are, I do take your point. We often get overly worried about unlikely dangers when obvious ones are staring us in the face.

To be very honest heart disease is also overreacted against. Especially when people read things like "food x causes % increase in heart disease"

But in the end it is a "natural" cause of death., It's not like people wouldn't be dying of something else

20yrs extra? Sure. 0.5% increase in heart disease for people over 60? Don't waste my time

I have to think a lot of kids died on playgrounds before the late 70s without that happening.

I'd guess that something changed at that time so the country was finally rich enough that this became a problem that got attention from The Powers That Be.

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