Smoking is bad for you ... in pictures

I am always surprised by how many interesting stories a dataset can tell. The latest StatsSA release of the Causes of Death dataset (2012) has a lot to say about death trends in South Africa. We always hear about HIV, TB, maternal and child deaths as leading causes of morbidity in South Africa. I am more interested in the micro-patterns. Here are some anecdotes:

We often hear that boys are more accident-prone than girls. In the early years, twice as many boys drown as girls. In their 20s, four times as many men drown as women.

Of the 3,980 gun deaths in 2012, 15 - 40 year-olds accounted for 70% of them.

Tragically, 8% of all deaths in 2012 involved babies under a year-old.

We know that smoking is bad for you - what does that really mean? Have a look at the image below:

If you are going to die of cancer, your likelihood peaks at around 62 years. If you are a non-smoker, that likelihood shifts to 65 years. The data includes just under 14,000 cancer deaths. From those, we can see that smokers simply don’t live as long as non-smokers.

In short, these revelations are nothing new. It is still satisfying to see that the data confirms it.

My next project - is it true that married men do actually live longer than their bachelor counterparts?