Statistics

Some interesting numbers found at Dr. Sanity:

1. U.K.’s heart-attack fatality rate is almost 20% higher than America’s

2. Angioplasties in Britain are only 21.3% as common as they are here

3. NICE ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer

4. Breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate; in Britain it’s almost double at 46%

5. Prostate cancer kills 19% of American and 57% of Brits

6. in 2006, a U.K-based board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took three years to get that outrageous decree reversed.

7. NICE will cut annual steroid injections for severe back pain from 60,000 to 3,000. Result? “It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky and has a 50% failure rate.”

8. Nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment

9. U.S. = 34 CT scanners per million; Britain = 8

10. U.S. = 27 MRI machines per million; Britain = 6

11. Brits wait twice as long to see a specialist than Americans

12. In U.S., recommended age for colon-cancer screening for men begins at 50. NHS starts at age 75.

13. Avastin, a drug for advanced colon cancer, is prescribed more often in the U.S. than in the U.K., by some estimates as much as 10 times more.

14. In U.K., 20% of potentially curable lung-cancer patients became incurable on the waiting list.