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Despite the horrendous toll AIDS has taken, and despite the millions killed each year by long-established infectious diseases such as malaria, epidemics are a far smaller threat to human health today than in previous millennia. The vast majority of people die from non-infectious illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, or simply from old age.17 (Incidentally cancer and heart disease are of course not new illnesses - they go back to antiquity. In previous eras, however, relatively few people lived long enough to die from them.)