MORTALITY

Introduction

The births and the deaths are the events related with the health that are notified with more frequency and they register, and the mortality is a standard measure of the state of a population's health. The Mortality is the traditional indicator of the socioeconomic state and of the level of life, mainly in the countries in that they are inadequate the mensurations of economic productivity. 
The mortality is an useful mensuration when it is to sit down sanitary priorities, to transmit information related with the health and to obtain support politician for some initiative in this field. It is a mensuration that the population can understand easily and that can influence in the perception that this population has of what constitutes a risk. This way, the following statement, with respect to the United States, is of great force and simplicity: "To smoke cigarettes, by itself, it produces more premature deaths than all the following ones you cause on the whole: syndrome of acquired inmunodeficiencia, cocaine, heroine, alcohol, fires, traffic accidents, homicides and suicides. However, the data that allow to make this statement type are difficult to gather, and the methodologies used to establish the number of attributable deaths to the tabaquismio are complex. 
The data have more than enough mortality, although they are useful, they don't describe the whole range of effects that an illness or group of illnesses exercises in tub population. They don't capture the pain, the morbilidad, the discapacidad, the economic cost neither the smallest quality in people's life that suffer an illness neither neither the secondary effects experienced by the family that loses one of their members.

However, other mensurations of the effect of tub certain illness also have their limitations. for example, the hope of life that allows to express the state of a population's health, can induce to error. In the countries in development, the hope of life leaves much more affected by the mortality neonatal and infantile that for the prevention of the illnesses or the therapeutic advances that modify the mature population's health. Those that have died from illnesses related with the tabaquismo had lived about 15 years more if they had not smoked. This potent influence is diluted if the improvement of the hope of the smokers' life is calculated taking out the total population's average.

In the analysis that continues, it will be tried to specify the number of deaths that take place in Latin America and the Caribbean because of the tobacco, although it will be necessary to keep in mind the limitations of the parameters standard for the mensuration of the mortality. It will be obtained this way an approach, a first step in the operative process dedicated to settle down which the impact of the tobacco is for the health in the America. The used methodology, in which the concept of attributable mortality is applied, complicated because of the necessity of to calculate and to adjust the available data to compensate the absence of some or the inadequacy of others. The effects of the empiric decisions that took analyze at the end.

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