(The Lie Which Keeps Huge Segments of Humanity Locked in the Dark Ages)

 If the truth be known, and the truth should be known, the powers-that-be don’t think humanity is worth counting, and so they don’t count it.  They give lots of lip service to reducing unnecessary death and poverty, but deliberately don’t measure it, so any efforts to alleviate what ails huge segments of humanity can never be properly evaluated and may even end up harming those intended to be helped.   The VERY FIRST STEP in solving any problem is, of course, to understand the true scope and nature of it.  If you don’t know what you’re up against, how can you address it?  How can you be sure you’re targeting the right areas or measure the effectiveness of your efforts if you don’t have a good baseline to measure success or failure?  When it comes to the very development of humanity, we still can’t.

Accurate and timely data on deaths and causes of death are essential. . . But for more than a quarter of the world’s population – largely in Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East – there are no recent data available. . .The quality of the information suffers as proper systems for death registration operate in only 29 of 115 countries that report such statistics to WHO.  These systems represent less than 13 % of the world population.  In the remaining countries, mortality statistics suffer from incomplete registration of births and deaths, and incorrect reporting of the cause of death and age. (World Health Organization, 10/05/07 [1]) 

Millions of poor people are missing from national statistics.  Living in informal settlements, they are simply not counted. (UN’s Human Development Report 2006, page 37[2].)

Even the most basic life indicators, such as births and deaths, are not directly registered in the poorest countries. Within this decade, only one African country (Mauritius) registers such events according to UN standards. Without reliable vital registration systems to

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