Canada tops U.S. in avoiding fatal ills

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Canada tops U.S. in avoiding fatal ills

By BARRY BROWN

News Toronto Bureau

9/1/2002

TORONTO - A study on the number of people who die from treatable diseases

has found that Americans are far more likely to die from them than are

Canadians.

In a study of U.S. and Canadian death rates from avoidable diseases, the

Toronto-based Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences found Americans

were far more likely to die from the diseases than were their northern

neighbors.

The most dramatic difference was in asthma-related deaths. The study found

that while U.S. death rates from the illness shot up by 56 percent between

1980 and 1996, deaths from the disease in Canada dropped by 79 percent.

" Asthma should be the easiest death to avoid, " said Dr. , the

study's lead researcher. While asthma rates are going up everywhere, the

American medical system has failed its people because of poor basic health

care, he said.

" With good accessibility to family doctors, " which is free under Canada's

health care system, " asthma deaths can be avoided because it can be detected

early, rather than waiting until it gets severe enough that patients end up

in emergency wards and ultimately die, " he said.

The study looked at deaths from diseases including cervical cancer,

appendicitis, breast cancer, hypertension, Hodgkin's disease, coronary

artery disease, stomach ulcers and tuberculosis, using figures from the U.S.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Canadian Mortality

Database.

While U.S. statistics showed a drop in avoidable deaths in all the areas

studied except asthma, the avoidable death rate in Canada fell far faster in

every category except breast cancer, in which the U.S. rate fell by 16

percent compared with Canada's 15 percent.

Avoidable deaths from TB fell by 50 percent in the United States, and by 71

percent in Canada. Hypertension rates dropped by 15 percent in the United

States, and by 41 percent in Canada.

said one way of measuring access to basic health care is the number

of family physicians. While Canada has roughly one family physician for

every specialist, Americans have one family physician for every four

specialists. More family physicians means faster treatment of patients

before they become severely ill.

" Too often we look at how many hospital beds or doctors there are, or what

the waiting lists are, but we don't look at what the health care system is

supposed to be doing at the end of the day - which is improving people's

health, " he said.