Sorry to not have posted in a while.  I had vacation and business to take care of.  I am trying to post two to three per week.  Send me your vitamin D3 survivor stories to email vitamindmark@gmail.com.

I have been truly amazed at the amount of misinformation that is thrown about during the debate over healthcare reform.  There are both good and bad parts of the legislation that is being proposed.  I believe that it is good if we can get to a health coverage that takes the enormous profits of the health insurance industry out of play and how the intent to profit negatively impacts health.  I do not believe that the government taking over these profits as another form of tax is proper either. On the other hand the intrusion of government into our private lives can be devastating.

As I was surfing the channels listening to the comments by various ‘news’ channels I found Bill O’Rielly and Dick Morris talking about one of President Obama’s recent speeches on the mater.  They were just about to end the segment when Dick Morris made the comment that Canada’s death rate from cancer was sixteen percent higher than the US.  “Why would we want a healthcare system that would cause this much higher death rate”, he said.  Bill agreed and they ended the segment.  I decided to follow this line of argument.

I found the total death rate from all neoplasms or ‘new growth’ to be 184 deaths per year per 100,000 in the US  for 2005.  From Reuters. I did confirm that that Canada’s death rate from cancer was about 16% higher.  In following the logic of modeling a country with low cancer death rates, I then looked at Mexico.  I found the death rate to be about 90 per 100,000 or about half of what the death rate was for the US.  Article in the Oxford Journals.  This is about half the rate as the US so we most likely would want to adopt the healthcare industry in Mexico?  Dick Morris, get a grip!  Fear mongering is not the answer to healthcare.

I then looked at the death rate from all causes from the CIA  data to follow Dick’s logic in how to discover a healthcare system that is most appropriate.  I found the 2009 est. for the US to be 8.3 per 1000 with a worldwide rank of 102.  I also found the death rate in Canada to be 7.74 per 1000 with a rank of 117 and Mexico at 4.8 per 1000 with a rank of 194.  The highest death rate with the number 1 rank is Swaziland at 30.8 per 1000 and the lowest was the United Arab Emirates with a rate of 2.11 per 1000 and a rank of 223.

Now what are we to make of this?  It is to be noted that the lowest death rates in the world are primarily in countries that are awash in sunshine.  Countries in the Middle East are highly populated in the lower rankings as well as countries along the lower latitudes, closer to the equator, in the world. Swaziland at the highest is totally understandable because it has been devastated with the HIV virus.  It is also the world’s last absolute monarchy which means that if you do not do what the government wants you die.  With the amount of war going on in the Middle East, it is surprising to find the deaths rates so low.  However, think of how these countries have so many days of no clouds and just bright sunshine.

Let’s think about Mexico.  Mexico City has the highest population of any city in the world at almost 9 million.  It is also located at approximately 7400 ft in elevation.  This puts it above a lot of the atmosphere that blocks out UVB waves that generate vitamin D in the skin.  As an aside it was the practice to build solarims for the treatment for TB in the first par of the first part of the 20th Century above 5000 ft.  As we have discussed in other post, vitamin D3 has a vector in the pathology of all disease.  It is interesting that the death rate from the H1N1 virus has been so high in this country.  However, in general as the H1N1 has spread the countries with low vitamin D levels have much higher death rates from this disease.

Could it be that Dick Morris is just wrong in his statement?  I think that the answer is absolutely yes.  What should we do for the health of the population?  The best answer for healthcare reform is to treat the populations of the world with the best available science.  That is to be sure that everyone’s serum 25(OH)D3 level is above 50 ng/ml.  As discussed earlier from a paper by Dr. William Grant of SUNARC.ORG the serum level of people in a sunny country is 54 ng/ml to 90 ng/ml.  This could be done for about $20 dollars per person per year.  What an inexpensive way to improve the health of all people.  For the US this is only 6 billion dollars per year.  I suspect that this is going to be significantly less than we spend on the H1N1 vaccine alone for this year.  It is also just a ‘drop in the bucket’ of that 2.5 trillion dollar US medical economy.  But here lies the problem.  The medical economy could drop by 30% if we healed the population and what would we do with all those lost insurance jobs.  I would not want to be president, but if I were, normalizing the serum 25(OH)D3 level would be the first thing I did.

Spend time in the sun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  – Pandemic Survivor