Paracetamol kills more people annually than plane crashes. A medical practitioner as well as academic, Dr C Aravinda, tells us that. The doc has written an article titled, ‘Over the counter, under the radar: can paracetamol be fatal?’ in the very first volume of Surf&Dive , a new publication from The Hindu . The article says that in the USA alone, paracetamol accounts for more than 60,000 emergency hospital visits annually and over 500 deaths. He draws a contrast between those figures and the 229 deaths that happened globally due to aviation accidents in 2023. The number of people killed by paracetamol globally every year will be many times more than the figure quoted above. There is no sufficient data available from other continents and hence we don’t know how many are killed by paracetamol there, let alone the victims of other medicines. Are our hospitals killers? I wouldn’t, of course, go to the extent of asserting that much. I have depended on the hospitals many times tho...
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