Which is the most important profession to your health?

            The majority of people would say that your medical doctor is the most important person to keeping us healthy.  That would be wrong. Here is some history behind what happened when medical doctors went on strike in different areas of the world. In Israel in 1973, the doctors went on strike for a month, and the death rate dropped 50 percent. There had not been a month with so few deaths since the previous doctor’s strike 20 years before. A few years later in Bogota, Columbia, and a two month long strike resulted in a 35 percent drop in the death rate. When Los Angeles county doctors went on a work slowdown to protest high malpractice premiums, the death rate dropped 18 percent, but when the slowdown ended and the medical industry got back to work, the death rate went right back to where it was previously. You and most everybody else would be surprised at what profession is the most important to your health. This profession is overlooked, yet has the greatest impact on our health on a daily basis.

The people that pick up our trash have one of the most dangerous jobs and also are life savers. Did you know that sanitation workers have twice the fatality rates of police officers, and nearly seven times the fatality rates of firefighters? A study done in 1851 about the New York City garbage strike concluded that fully a third of the city’s deaths that year could have been prevented if basic sanitary measures had been in place. Rates of preventable disease went down. Mortality rates went down. It also had a ripple effect across all different areas of the city.

This is the main reason why third world countries have so many health problems, because they live in unsanitary conditions. They don’t have access to clean drinking water because of people dumping their trash in where their water supply is coming from. The amount of preventable diseases in these countries would go way down just by cleaning up their trash in a more environmental friendly way.

Maybe next time you see your garbage man picking up your trash you will say thank you for being such an important person to your health.