“The global suicide rate fell nearly 40 percent between 1990 and 2021, according to a recent analysis from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. East Asia and Western Europe saw the largest declines of 66 percent and 41 percent, respectively,” reports The Doomslayer. “While this progress was widespread, it was not universal. Specifically, it seems to have skipped over South, Central, and North America, the only regions that experienced a rising suicide rate.”
746,000 deaths from suicide occurred across the globe in 2021, including 519,000 deaths among males and 227,000 deaths among females, reports The Lancet. “The age-standardised mortality rate has declined over time, from 14·9 deaths” per “100,000 population in 1990 to 9.0” per 100,000 in 2021. “Regionally, mortality rates due to suicide were highest in eastern Europe” (19.2 per 100,000), southern sub-Saharan Africa (16.1 per 100,000), and central sub-Saharan Africa (14.4 per 100,000). The average “age at which individuals died from suicide progressively increased during the study period. For males, the mean age at death by suicide in 1990 was 43.0 years,” “increasing to 47.0 years” in 2021. “For females, it was 41.9 years” in 1990 and 46.9 years in 2021. “The incidence of suicide attempts requiring medical care was consistently higher at the regional level for females than for males. The number of deaths by suicide using firearms was higher for males than for females, and substantially varied by country and region. The countries with the highest age-standardised rate of suicides attributable to firearms in 2021 were the USA, Uruguay, and Venezuela.”
The death rate from drowning has fallen by 38% worldwide since 2000. The death rate from breast cancer for American women has fallen 58% since 1975. The death rate from heart disease has fallen a lot in the United States, France, and England since 1950.
The African nation of Guinea recently eradicated sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse that causes irreversible brain damage and then death, if left untreated (sleeping sickness also leads to disrupted sleeping patterns, aggressiveness, psychosis, and bizarre behavior).
Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Carried by those flies are long thin parasitic worms that burrow in the sufferer’s skin.
