Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Stephen Gold’s article in the November 1992 Freeman, “The Rise of Markets and the Fall of Infectious Disease” (footnotes deleted):

Even so, the United States at the turn of the century – far from being the simple, rustic country envisioned by Americans today – was in fact a nation under siege by infectious diseases. In 1900 over 500 Americans out of every 100,000 died from them, or the often inevitable complications resulting from such illnesses. To put this kind of health threat into perspective, cancer, the scourge of modern America, kills about 200 of every 100,000 Americans each year.

DBx: And by 2016, the annual death rate from cancer in the United States was down to 155.7 per 100,000 persons.