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by tptacek 5032 days ago
In 2007 there were 8,324 deaths linked to MRSA in the UK. In 2005, there were between 4,429-8,850 (6,639 w/ 95% CI) deaths linked to MRSA in the US. There are more than 5 times as many people in the United States than in the UK.

I obviously do not have the specific stats at my fingertips to refute the anecdote you've supplied, but if there were a way for us to bet on which of our arguments the correct statistic is going to support, I'd bet on my argument.
1 comments
Retric 5032 days ago
Where do you get those numbers? MRSA is thought to have caused 1,652 deaths in 2006 in UK up from 51 in 1993.[104] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...

Still, for those numbers to be useful the rate of infection, detection, treatment, death, AND linking deaths to MRSA must be considered before you can compare those healthcare systems as well as a near constant rare of infection.

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tptacek 5032 days ago
Sorry, I got Clostridium confused with MRSA. But 1,652 normalized for population is still higher than the US MRSA fatality number!

I'm not sure what the second sentence means. If you're saying we don't know how to properly attribute deaths to MRSA, what does any MRSA statistic say about health care?

You have a long row to hoe with the overall argument you're making. It is, for instance, not hard to link deaths to heart disease, and heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. The US has fewer heart disease deaths per 100,000 people than Austria, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the UK, Finland, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Hungary, and Slovakia, and is closer to Germany and Denmark, the #14 and #15 followers to the US's #12, than it is to Austria's #11.

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Retric 5032 days ago
Yes, I am saying in many cases we don't know cause of death. In most of the US we do a crap job of discovering cause of death in many cases. When you dig into the numbers specific coroners often have different old guy died in sleep dumping grounds. 'Hart disease' often ends up as a grab bag for any number of quiet killers such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulmonary_Embolism.

PS: Perhaps the most humorous being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death, but the sadist and most blunt is probably: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_infant_death_syndrome which is literally 'death without obvious cause'.

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