Facts and figures.docVIP

Comment Facts and figures Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA. Email: petsko@ Published: 28 July 2006 Genome Biology 2006, 7:111 (doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-7-111) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2006/7/7/111 ? 2006 BioMed Central Ltd I spend far too much time flipping through a slim volume that arrives in my mailbox at the start of every summer. No, it isn’t a travel brochure for island get-aways. It’s the Pocket World in Figures, published by The Economist mag- azine. (I realize I am committing something of a faux pas by referring to The Economist as a magazine. With a haughtiness they perhaps have earned, since they’ve been in business since September 1843, they always refer to themselves as “this newspaper”. It’s sort of like David Beckham referring to himself in the third person, I guess.) I’ve been a subscriber for over 30 years, and along with the only decent news coverage of the world outside the United States, one of the other benefits I get is this yearly little book. are endemic. The lowest death rate, 1.3 per 1,000, is in the United Arab Emirates. Places 2 through 10 from the lowest death rate are occupied by other oil-rich, Middle-Eastern countries, suggesting a correlation between wealth and health. But it can’t be that: Mexico is 13th and the Philip- pines is 16th from the top. Neither the US nor the UK even cracks the top 25. The disease figures are equally fascinating. The countries with the highest death rates from breast cancer are all Northern European. The diets and lifestyles are so different, it makes one wonder if there’s a gene in there somewhere. Hungary has a lung cancer death rate almost 20% higher than any other country