Causes of Death in the USA

“The Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil”—our mission too?

By Ralph D. Winter, originally published on April 25, 2004

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Click to enlarge. Row 18 indicates the reported number of deaths in the USA, per year in Column 1, and per day in Column 5. Row 16 sums up the total number of deaths in the USA per year due to the 15 causes listed in rows 1-15. Each row gives the breakdown for each of the different causes of death, Column 1 = annual total, Column 5 = daily total. Column 1 data for 2001, from the National Center for Health Statistics, 2003. Other columns and calculations, RDW, 4/25/04

How few die a natural death!

1. Note that the deaths from the causes listed in rows 1-8, Column 4, account for 75% of all deaths in the USA.
2. Note that the number of deaths in the USA from just homicide (Row 14) is only 7/10 of 1% of all deaths.
3. Note that the number of deaths from heart disease plus cancer (Column 4, Row 2) constitutes more than half (51%) of all deaths.
4. Lines 5, 11 and 14 are non-disease causes. Together they represent 4%, 1/3% and 0.7% of the total. The remaining twelve disease-related causes are still 76.4% of the total deaths. (Should that be true?)
5. If Line 17, “Other Causes,” is mostly disease, then pathogenic or germ-based disease accounts for even more than 76.4% of deaths. Yet 99% of medical/pharmaceutical funds focus on treating disease, not eradicating the pathogenic sources.

Beneath these silent statistics...

Beneath these silent statistics is a raging war of pathogenic disease against human beings. This war prematurely drags down to death in pain and suffering about four out of five people who die in the United States. Subtracting lines 5, 11, and 14, eight out of ten dies an unnatural death. This is not a pretty picture, and not something to look forward to. As someone said, I am not afraid of death, just the process of dying.

But the absolute wonder is that less than one percent of medical funds go to disease sources instead of disease treatments. There are several reasons for this.

1. Until recently many of these diseases were not understood to be the result of infections (pathogens, that is, viruses, bacteria or parasites), but because of “conditions.” Duodenal ulcers also were because of stress and spicy food, etc., not a bacterium (heliobacter pylori). Tuberculosis was assumed to be caused by sleeping in damp places, not by a pathogen. Heart disease has long been described as being caused by conditions like salt or cholesterol in the diet and as a gradual build-up of plaque in the arteries. Now it is clear that half of all who die of heart attacks don’t possess any of the alleged symptoms. Now, heart deaths are attributed to sudden “eruption” of inflammation in arterial walls (due to an infection), which suddenly blocks arteries and thus strains and damages the heart, suddenly. Strong evidence has now been acknowledged to indicate that infections underlie heart disease, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and schizophrenia, for example.
2. A second major reason is that Western theology has a blind spot stemming from the Neo-Platonism of Augustine (in the fourth century AD). Thus, we tend to look for God’s after-the-fact purposes in a tragedy. We don’t often seek to eradicate the causes—unless we think they are conditions like lack of exercise, wrong nutrition, etc. Jonathan Edwards (1740s) was accused of “interfering with Divine Providence” when he sought to employ a vaccine to defend his Indians from smallpox.
3. The simplest factor to explain is that sick people seeking healing (not causal explanations) provide the truly enormous resources of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Over 99% of all such funds, understandably, focus on treatments not origins of disease. Yet, most government money (NIH, NCI, etc.) is also manipulated or influenced by the medical/pharmaceutical industries, so also with the research grants on which university faculties live. In other words, relatively little concern ends up for disease origins. 

N.T. Wright and a Theology of Disease

Flickr/Jordon Cooper

By Beth Snodderly

One way to describe the overarching goal Dr. Winter had in mind for the Roberta Winter Institute (RWI) is, “To prompt the theological world to begin working on a ‘theology of disease.’” Admittedly this came to Dr. Winter’s mind as a crucial need due to his first wife’s fatal bout with cancer. Throughout those and the following years he reflected on the types of inadequate responses to disease that are prevalent in the evangelical world and concluded that this was an obstacle to the spread of the gospel among thinking people in major unreached blocs of the world’s peoples. After his wife’s death he founded the RWI to address these issues. These are some quotes from a compilation of his writings I put together several years ago:

The Roberta Winter Institute will try to upgrade our desire to bring glory to God by ending our apparently Neo-Platonist truce with Satan in the realm of all his ingenious and destructive works. Our global mission agencies, which already have to their credit the discovery of the nature of leprosy, will declare war on other sources of disease in addition to being helpfully kind to sick people and preaching resignation amidst suffering.

We need to rectify our understanding of a God who is not the author of the destructive violence in nature, including disease, and who has long sought our help in bringing His kingdom and His will on earth.          

To “destroy Satan’s works” (1 John 3:8) means to take it as part of our efforts, our mission, to glorify God to restore, with God's help, what Satan has distorted. Thus, you see the rationale for establishing the Roberta Winter Institute.

The primary focus of this new institute is public and mission awareness of the need for a new theological sensitivity for destroying the works of the devil.

Several years ago, I came across N.T. Wright’s work and noticed that in many of his writings he has come close to the perspective Dr. Winter was advocating.

Those who now belonged to Jesus’ people  … were thrust out … to fulfill Israel’s vocation on behalf of the world. (The New Testament and the People of God, p. 458)

[Messiah’s message] … compels the followers of Jesus, energized by the power of his Spirit, to go out into the world and make new creation happen, confident that as that work has already begun in Jesus’ resurrection, and will be completed when heaven and earth are united at last, so the signs of that completion can truly be brought to birth in changed lives and societies in the present time. (Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, pp. 145, 146)

The New Testament points to the ultimate future, to the promise of a world set free from evil altogether, and invites us to hold that in our minds and hearts so that we know where we’re going. We are to implement the achievement of Jesus and so to anticipate God’s eventual world. (Evil and the Justice of God, p. 104)

The Christian imagination … needs to be awakened, enlivened and pointed in the right direction. … Christians need to sense permission, from God and from one another, to exercise their imaginations in thinking ahead into God’s new world and into such fresh forms of worship and service as will model and embody aspects of it. We need to have this imagination energized, fed and nourished, so that it is lively and inventive, not sluggishly going around the small circles of a few ideas learned long ago. (Evil and the Justice of God, p. 126)

It seems to me that the Roberta Winter Institute is trying to do what Wright is calling for, attempting to awaken and enliven the Christian imagination to include this new form of service to bring glory to God. Once we acknowledge disease in the category of “evil” (rather than as “God’s will”) we can see the need to mobilize the body of Christ to seek to eradicate diseases as a means of anticipating “God’s eventual world.”

Ultimately, what Dr. Winter would have loved to see is someone like N.T. Wright publicly acknowledge efforts to eradicate disease as one of the signs of what the new creation will look like, and getting behind a scholarly movement to work toward a theology of disease.

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Beth Snodderly is the RWI's Theologian in Residence and Chair of the Advisory Board.

Five Revelations Concerning the Battle Against Disease

Compiled from the writings of Ralph D. Winter

By Emily Lewis

Flickr/svenwerk

1. Healing the sick or seeking the source of the sickness?

The enormous expenditures we as a society make in the medical world are almost entirely focused on healing the sick not seeking the source of the sickness. Neither in the practice of medicine (doctors and hospitals) nor in the pharmaceutical world is there—nor can there be—significant concern or focus upon the origins of disease. 

2. Inexpensive medicines can't obtain FDA approval.

Our well-intended FDA—designed to give approval of helpful medicines—has developed a process of approval which costs, supposedly, from $400 to $800 million. This forces very high prices on what is approved. Even more ominous is the bald truth that no product that is inexpensive to manufacture or that can easily be sold by anyone will ever justify the enormous expense of that approval process.

3. Infections may be at the root of chronic illness.

While the causes of many well-known chronic illnesses (heart disease, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and schizophrenia) are commonly attributed to lifestyle and environment (diet and toxic agents), a totally new development in the university world is the strong suspicion that infectious agents, either viral or bacterial, are basically producing all of the mentioned chronic diseases.

4. Neo-Platonism influences our view of disease and evil.

Christian theology since the fourth century has been greatly influenced by Neo-Platonism in respect to ascribing all evil to God, not Satan. Our inherited theology allows us to fight “terrorists” that can be seen with the naked eye but not to fight tiny terrorists that can only be seen in a microscope.  That tiny world we assume is amenable only to God and to our prayers. We have no formulated mission to intervene.

5. God will not make sense.

The effect of this theology upon our efforts of evangelism and mission is that God will NOT make sense if we attribute to Him what Satan does.

Editor's Note: These ideas are excerpted from an essay written by Ralph D. Winter entitled, "A Growing Awareness About Disease." You can read the full essay by clicking to read more.  

Emily Lewis is the RWI's Content Curator and Social Media Manager