There was some bad news for people who suffer from heartburn this week. It turns out that 1 out of every 500 people who use a common form of anti-heartburn medication, protein pump inhibitors, will die as a result of the drugs’ side effects – “a host of adverse events”. Among the protein pump inhibitors available for heartburn are Nexium, Prevacid and Prilosec.
About 15 million Americans use protein pump inhibitors every year, which means that every year, 30,000 Americans are being killed by their heartburn medications.
The federal government is currently obsessed with a crusade to stop terrorism in the United States, but the truth is that people in the USA are almost never killed by terrorists. There has never been even a single year where anything close to 30,000 Americans were killed by terrorists.
Why do we have a Department of Homeland Security dedicated to stopping terrorism, which is a tiny threat, but we don’t have a Department of Anti-Proton-Pump-Inhibitors, which kill so many more Americans than terrorists do?