i saw one of those ads about heart disease come on tv today, the ones where they say that tell you how many people die of heart conditions every minute and how dreadful it is and how we should give lots of money to research so we can prevent that. now, it's not occurred to me before, but isn't that kind of rubbish? in the first place, statistics like that -- surely nowadays with however umpteen billion people we have on the planet talking about x number of people dying every minute is sort of misleading. also -- and i don't have the figures -- but aren't high death rates due to heart disease a sign of affluence? i mean, you have to die of something, right? isn't it more desirable for people to be dying of heart disease at 80 rather than TB at 15? or am i the crazy one here?