July 3, 2008 (LPAC)--There have been many recent attempts to kill the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), especially with the Doha round of trade negotiations on the ropes. The newest knife drawn against CAP comes from the UN's World Health Organization (WHO), which has released a study in the latest {Bulletin of the World Health Organization} attributing to CAP a "substantial" burden of European mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD)--the largest killer of Europeans, accounting for 49% of all deaths. CAP subsidies to dairy farmers and livestock producers is the culprit for the murder of thousands of Europeans, says the WHO, raising cholesterol levels and blood pressure in the populace by making meat and high-fat milk products widely available and cheap--even encouraging school children to guzzle whole milk.

Using statistical modelling, the armchair number crunchers calculated that there were 9800 excess deaths from CHD (coronary heart disease) and 3000 excess deaths from stroke attributable to CAP subsidies (using year 2000 death data), out of approximately one million total deaths from those diseases in 15 EU countries. That parses out to less than 1.3% of the CVD mortality, even if you believed their pathetic modeling.

According to the study's own words: "CAP, while established on the basis of sound public health principles, may now have become a hazard to public health throughout the EU and may be promoting inequalities in health through the types of food consumed. This might controversially be described as `a system designed to kill Europeans through CHD'."

You don't have to squint to read the lesson between these lines: Free Trade is good for your health; Protectionism kills; and sophistry causes brain damage.