ANDRZEJ KRAUZEThis issue of The Scientist is devoted to the science, funding, and drug development directed toward rare diseases. As illustrated here, various countries define “rare” in this context differently: in Chile, for example, a disease is rare if it afflicts at most 50 out of 100,000 citizens, while in South Korea, no more than 5 people out of 100,000 may suffer from the malady for it to be categorized as rare.
But in the U.S.—where diseases are deemed rare if they affect 64 out of 100,000 people or fewer—recent tragedies demand that we take a look at another scourge that claims lives at an alarming rate: the disease of gun violence. According to researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 32,000 Americans die and more than 67,000 people are injured by firearms each year (Prev Med, 79:5-14, 2015). Those same researchers more recently estimated that 1,300 US children die from gunshot wounds every year, and almost 5,800 are injured by firearms. Using just a year’s worth of these statistics, almost 10 Americans out of every 100,000 suffer the ill effects of gun violence—meaning one could think of gun violence as ...
