Deaths under 40: cancer, motorbikes and debt among the causes

Dying before 40: the causes that don't wait their turn

How many people die before turning 40? The question is uncomfortable, but a round of personal experiences offers a troubling sample. Cancer, heart attacks, motorbike accidents, multi-organ failure and suicides creep into an age that is supposed to be protected. What is most striking is not the list itself, but how random much of it is.

Illnesses that kill before 40

The clinical cases come with specific ages: multi-organ failure at 36, a brain tumour in a 37-year-old father of two who died less than two months after diagnosis, a leukaemia that began as a cold that wouldn't heal in the middle of the ELbichito crisis, with a months-old baby at home. There is also cirrhosis in someone under 30 after repeated detox treatments. The impression is that medical protocols fall short when the patient seems too young for what is happening to them.

Accidents, debt and other unusual deaths

It isn't all illness. Motorbikes appear in several stories, and there is also a death from a jellyfish sting, witnessed by someone who saw the outcome firsthand. The economic element surfaces in a suicide in 2008-2009 over debts owed by local councils, along with the warning that such debts are inherited. Another case involves a firefighter who found his own son. The pattern is as varied as it is unsettling.

There are no grand figures in this shared experience, but there is something more uncomfortable: the certainty that, before 40, the margin for manoeuvre is far thinner than we like to think.