Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Jeanne Calment, who lived for 122 years and 164 days (longer than any other person), said the secret to her longevity was a diet rich in olive oil, port wine and chocolate. She smoked until the age of 117. Alexander Imich, who was the oldest living man (111) until he died in June, did not have a secret. Asked how he lived so long, he replied, "I don't know, I sim­ply didn't die earlier."

Predictions without dates are easy. All trees fall; it is spotting the diseased ones that is trick.

In 1847 Ignac Semmelweis pioneered mother-friendly childbirth insisting that doctors should wash their hands between autopsy and delivery rooms.

Anti-corruption campaigners would have nothing to cheer if the cure ended up being more harmful than the disease.

Changing a face can change nothing, but facing a change can change everything.

People around the world produce an estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine every year.

America's hospitals are the most expensive part of the world's most ex­pensive health system. They accounted for $851 billion, or 31%, of Ame­rican health spending in 2011. If they were a country, they would be the world's 16th-largest economy.

He learned about the "umbles": as hypothermia sets in you mum­ble, fumble, grumble, stumble, then finally tumble. Without help you die.

Asked the secret of his youthfulness, Benito Martinez Abrogan, 120, said he had never cheated a man or said bad things of other people.

Patriotism requires Medicare for all. Somehow, neither has caught on.

Patriotism requires Medicare for all. Somehow, neither has caught on.

Puffing 15-24 cigarettes a day, on average, robs a smoker older than 35 of five hours of life each and every day. But 20 minutes of moderate exer­cise a day earns almost an hour back. Alcohol wears a Janus face: the first drink of the day adds about 30 minutes per day to one's life expec­tancy, but each subsequent one cuts it back by 15 minutes.

The Amish in America spurn modern medicine, along with al­most everything else invented since the 17th century.

The UN reckons that by 2100 the planet's population will be rising past 10.9 billion, and be much older. The median age will go up from 29 to 41, and around 28% will be over 60. A few may even remember this article.

ERC, a research firm, says consumption per person was 999 ciga­rettes a year in 1990 and only 882 in 2012. Yet the appetite for cigarettes continues to rise. Smokers lit up 5.9 trillion times last year compared with 5.1 trillion in 1990. ERC tracks 123 countries, home to about 99% of smokers. It finds the worst addicts in cen­tral and eastern Europe. Serbians each smoke a lung-blackening 3,323 cigarettes per year, more than any other nationality. Eight of the top ten countries, ranked by consumption per person, are in the former Eastern block.

The more sophisticated the patient, the less scalpel-happy the doctors. The best informed patients of all are, of course, other doctors. Sure enough, physicians went under the knife much less often than the aver­age Ticino resident. Lawyers' wives — whom doctors have good reason to fear — had the fewest hysterectomies of all.

Walgreens is another operator of worksite clinics. One of its 358 centres is in Orlando, at the Disney theme park. It aims to treat Disney's "cast members" quickly (unblocking their huge ears and fixing their fairy wings, presumably), so they can go back to work.

Doctors manage to restart only about half of the hearts that stop in a hospital, and only about a sixth of patients will go on to survive long enough to be discharged. One of the toughest decisions faced by hospi­tal staff is how long to keep trying, and when to give up on a particular patient as a lost cause.

The lexicon of oncology is filled with military metaphors: the war on cancer, aggressive tumours, magic bullets. And although these are indeed only metaphors, they do reflect an underlying attitude — that it is the clinician's job to attack and destroy his patient's tumour directly, with whatever weapons are to hand. As in real warfare, those weapons may be conventional (surgery), chemical (cancer-killing drugs) or nuclear (radiation therapy). There is even talk of biological agents, in the form of viruses spe­cifically tailored to seek out and eliminate their tumorous targets. Which is all well and good as strategies go. But as Sun Tzu ob­served, the wisest general is not one who wins one hundred victo­ries in one hundred battles, but rather one who overcomes the ar­mies of his enemies without having to fight them himself. And one way to do that is to get someone else to do your fighting for you.

Is dumping faeces in rivers UN policy?