The Four Horsemen just bought Utes

An artists impression of the neo-apocalypse

I first saw this in article on the ABC news about our youth "Dying in droves", I decided to followed up on the articles source a population study in The Lancet. As you can probably tell from the title it address the mortality of young people and I found the findings of this study somewhat surprising. But perhaps in hindsight maybe not so surprising. I scanned through most of the article, until I got to the summary table on page 889 and few things stood out straight away[1].

(click image to enlarge)

First of all, it's found that road traffic accidents kill more young men than any other cause, more than war or any type of disease. It's the #1 killer and by a significant margin. So vehicles are dangerous, we already knew that, but by contrast in the case of young women, road traffic accidents come in at #5. Not only that but in women, road traffic accidents killed 50,000 people world wide, but in men it was 202,000. More than 4 times as many. Just being a guy in a car increases the risk by 400%.

The next two biggest killers for young men are violence and suicides. Again the comparison to women is stark, who in their top three include respiratory tract infections, suicide and AIDS and even in the case of suicides 20,000 more men kill themselves more than women.

I know this assumes the women as the base line, but still, the top three killers of young men globally is not disease or war. Causes I'd consider as external factors because they are largely out of the individuals control. It surprised me that the biggest killers are behavioural, and are within the individuals sphere of influence. Special pleading could argue that not all traffic accidents are the fault of the driver and not all violence is provoked. But then why the disparity between the sexes, violence doesn't even enter into the top 10 for women.

(Just pause to consider all that for a moment)

There is a underlying cause here, but rather than choosing either nature or nurture, I'm going to blame both. I think its obvious that evolutionary selection puts pressure on behaviour just as much as it has on physical characteristics. So not only are men on average are larger and stronger than women, they're also prone to behaviours that involve taking risks, engage in violence or make them susceptible to depression. What’s not so obvious is that we are probably reinforcing this selection by the way in which we raise our sons and the way our society treats them once they are outside our care. Having never raised a son, I can’t comment on the first idea (perhaps my dad can). I can only speculate on the later and even then I don't have a lot of idea to explain this phenomenon. I consider it sobering to think that the way that we treat our friends, acquaintances and even men we dislike on a day to day basis is having an effect on global mortality greater than war and any other disease in the top 10 combined. This is a case where little things do count.

So some take home messages;

1. Probably most obviously, don’t let your mates drive like wing nuts.
2. Treat your mates and acquaintances with respect, even if you hate the bastard (this is one case where you’ll have to fight your instincts) just walk away.
3. Look after your mates, don’t turn a blind eye, there may be a day when the world shits on you and you’ll need help yourself.
4. And finally if you look at #4, learn to swim and your DR ABC.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents, I wrote this because I think Australian men are particularly preyed upon by expectations and bull shit ideals that are left over from the stone age. But the mate-ship ideal may have some points worth promoting, the better parts of which may even save us from ourselves.

[1] Patton, G.C. The Lancet, 2009, 374(9693), p881-892.