Medicine: Public Health What!

Heart disease has had a stronghold as the number one cause of death since the coming of antibiotics. So it is fascinating to see that because of a drop in the number of smokers, heart disease falls to second place behind the always competing cancer. And even though lung cancer is still by far the most devastating of the cancers, much can be said about the interventional effect public health initiatives have had on levels of smoking. From large taxes to public smoking bans, the increasing public awareness of the extent smoking harms us has never been higher!

Some would say heart disease has greatly benefitted from the enormously popular statin family of drugs (Lipitor, Zocor, Vytorin), but at the end of the day, the preventable causes are still the primary factors in occurrence and progression of both heart disease and cancer. I applaud this new statistic and hope we keep up the eating right and exercise!