The United States medical system, combined with the industrial food complex, kill and maim people on a colossal scale every single year.
Heart disease kills over 683,000 Americans annually. Cancer kills another 620,000. Stroke, diabetes, chronic lung disease, sepsis, obesity-related metabolic disease, opioid overdoses, and preventable medical errors collectively account for millions of deaths, disabilities, and shattered families.
And yet, if you browse the front page of the CDC website on any given week, there is a decent chance you will find public health officials issuing urgent alerts about backyard chickens, raw milk, pet turtles, or someone hugging a duck too enthusiastically.
Seriously.
At the very moment when roughly 1,870 Americans are dying every day from heart disease and another 1,700 from cancer, federal public health agencies are sounding alarms about salmonella from backyard poultry.
The contrast has become almost surreal.
One recent CDC warning involved 34 reported salmonella cases linked to backyard poultry across 13 states. Thirteen hospitalizations were reported. No deaths. Another CDC investigation from 2024 linked backyard poultry exposure to 470 salmonella cases and one death nationwide.
To be clear, salmonella infections are unpleasant. Severe cases can absolutely happen, particularly in small children or immunocompromised individuals. Basic hygiene around animals and food handling matters. But the sheer disproportion between the magnitude of America’s actual health catastrophes and the obsessive messaging priorities of modern public health is impossible to ignore.
Americans are drowning in chronic disease.
Over 40 percent of U.S. adults are now obese. Diabetes continues to explode. Cardiovascular disease remains the nation’s leading killer. Cancer rates in younger adults continue to rise. Meanwhile, researchers from Johns Hopkins estimated that medical errors themselves may contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year, potentially making preventable medical harm the third leading cause of death in America.
Yet somehow the institutional energy of public health repeatedly gravitates toward regulating raw milk farmers, warning people not to kiss chickens, and issuing carefully branded panic messaging campaigns over statistically tiny risks.
Why?
Because modern public health increasingly behaves less like a system designed to improve population health and more like a managerial communications apparatus. The goal is no longer primarily to build a healthier citizenry. The goal is to demonstrate vigilance, maintain bureaucratic relevance, manage narratives, and continuously remind the public that experts are monitoring every conceivable risk, no matter how trivial.
And triviality matters here.
Hellbound and Down 