This is the time of year when the best-of or look-back lists start rolling out, and Spoonful of Medicine just posted a few (including favorite biomedical insights and drugs that made it big or went bust). I found the year in numbers, which it linked to from Nature Medicine, rather interesting, and a few figures jumped out at me:
- 40 million - number of H1N1 vaccine doses (costing about $260 million) incinerated in June 2010 by the US government after they expired
- 14.6 million - the number of people worldwide supposed to be receiving antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV/AIDS, according to new guidelines from the [World Health Organization (WHO)]
- 4 million - number of individuals born thanks to in vitro fertilization, as estimated by the Karolinska Institute when they awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine to IVF pioneer Robert Edwards
- 1.3 million - estimated annual deaths from lung cancer worldwide, according to the WHO
- 18,449 - number of confirmed deaths from pandemic H1N1, according to... WHO
