From Delicious, I saw that Yahoo had an article about the top 5 killers of men. I thought it would be nice to see from where they get there data.

First, I have to mention that the article is really about American men, nothing else (not about mankind, not about men around the world, not about women, children, etc.). The article is related to the US National Men’s Health Week (the US National Women’s Health Week was in May 8-14, 2011). Although the article is giving advices, there are no sources of information.

However, it’s rather easy to obtain these numbers …

For the US, the CDC FastStats website is a hub to data about health in the US. Here is the CDC ranking for the top 5 killers in 2007 (in both US women and men):

1. Heart disease: 616,067 deaths
2. Cancer: 562,875 deaths
3. Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952 deaths
4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924 deaths
5. Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706 deaths

If you look at the whole world (data from the UN), the picture is somehow different! The UN ranking for the top 5 killers in 2008 (in both women and men) is:

1. Lower respiratory infections: 1.05 million deaths
2. Diarrhoeal diseases: 0.76 million deaths
3. HIV/AIDS: 0.72 million deaths
4. Ischaemic heart disease: 0.57 million deaths
5. Malaria: 0.48 million deaths

All of them causes more than 45% of deaths around the world. These diseases with high-mortality vary in an important manner when we compare the USA and the whole world. The main caveat is that the data I presented above are for men and women. It would be interesting to use the UN data API project to dig further into details.

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