You must have come across the Facebook debate yesterday in Digital Farmers. What is most appalling, is that the raw material to make our expensive killer cooking oil, is imported!!! We are not only killing ourselves, but we've included our farmers and economies to the mix

Studies on cause of death are in my opinion the most useless and sensational pieces of information. We all know that we will all die yet when a reason for the death is published it is meant to elicit some cause for action to eliminate the cause. Knowing that we will all die someday what would be an acceptable cause of death? Say we do all that we can and we eliminate Cardiovascular disease as a cause of death, what graph of death statistics would we want to see so that we can say, we are doing really well? If more people died of what, would we say there was no problem?

Technically everybody dies of the same thing; Cardiopulmonary arrest, the heart stops beating, blood stops circulating and breathing ceases. There is actually a medical exam that some Medical school professors with a dark sense of humor are fond of throwing at some students. A student is brought into a room in which the patient is dead and asked to conduct all the examinations and arrive at a diagnosis. It is a quite detailed examination that involves checking for responsiveness, checking the dilation of the pupils to light, checking for pulse and breathing etc.......... Only after doing all the examinations correctly can a diagnosis of death be arrived at.

Worldwide yes... but most of those deaths happen in Africa.

Who told you they were healthier than us?

Alot of us are already back. Substitute 'We' for 'I'... Mafuta a Ng'ombe here is Ghee. Amongst the healthiest cooking oil in the world. Unfortunately overpriced, but if you visit your local supermarket, its a blessing if you get it. I use the tin KCC Ghee

I disagree - where is the proof! There is no proof! look around! where are the brothers and sisters to these very old people? wangapi wamefika hii miaka after crossing 10? We somehow romanticize these old people without statistical proof because we have seen one very old person somewhere and thought - they all lived to be that old. They died from diseases like the above but were misattributed and under reported. Cancers are not new... they appear to be new because more people are crossing the threshold where cancers start to show up. So kwa ufupi - we are likely to outlive these people just because of the sheer scale of people who will live to be 80,90 e.t.c.

It's probable that the factors linked with the highest deaths are correlated with high wish for death given living conditions.

That is, as Karl Menninger found out man deliberately wills himself dead.

But, do we have data on how trees and other living organisms last? For example which organisms live the longest?

I understand the humble jellyfish lives forever.

My fren, get into the opium of the masses, get peace that surpasses all understanding. Peace too, from the inevitable death. Then you'll be able to sleep at night.

Most humans know very little of themselves to be able to answer your question @Masukuma.

The matter seems to be about people dieing before their expected date rather than people dieing per se.

What a human's natural lifespan is, is something else that's under no consensus.

But for me humans are meant to be immortal.