The World Health Organization says eighty-five percent of all vision problems could be prevented or cured.
VOA: special.2010.04.27
In other words, if we curedall diseases and prevented all accidents, people would still die (of old age) in a narrow bell curve distribution centered on 85.
For the people Alex Heard has been talking to across the United States for roughly the past decade, the dawn of the 21st century involves waiting for enlightened space travellers, stockpiling food and ammunition for an environmental Armageddon or preserving severed human heads for the day when all disease can be cured.