cousjath

Comment Threads

• Heteromeles commented on Just plain icky
  You're absolutely right. And, of course, the irony here is you can live a long time in a place where there is naturally clean water, adequate food, no pernicious parasites, predators, or pathogens. Islands like Okinawa, parts of Greece, or other blue zones, in other words. Things don't have to be complicated to clean. Mess up their water supply, introduce malaria, and so forth, and their inhabitants' lifespans will crash like others have. What we're doing with modern industrial civilization is simply making ideal living conditions for some. Still, I'm not sure that everyone could get to 120, even if...
• PrivateIron commented on Just plain icky
  Infant/toddler mortality is ridiculously high without modern sanitation/nutrition/perinatal care/vaccination. Life expectancy for people who make it out of early childhood in these circumstance is not great, but much closer to what we now consider normal. The big boom in "average life expectancy" was from saving those toddlers. One way that America sucks: we have awful infant mortality numbers for an "advanced nation."...
• Heteromeles commented on Just plain icky
  Awful is relative. I agree that the US can do better on infant mortality. IIRC, though, even South Sudan, which has the highest infant mortality rate of any nation, still has a lower infant mortality rate than, say, Renaissance London. Even in abject poverty and civil war, science, medicine, and public health are not helpless. Still, there's a second boom from cleaner water, in that more people live past their 40s, that according to at least one water engineer. I'm not sure it's true (more sources would be nice), but it's worth checking on. According to this guy, things like...
• Greg Tingey commented on Just plain icky
  Not "just" JUST! ) clean water, but also adequate nutrition in childhood & possibly even more important, during the mother's pregnancy. In the UK we still have not seen the full work-through of the effect of rationing & consequent proper feeding of mothers during WWII, nor the proper feeding of thior post-War offspring ( like me, born 1946 ) And my mother was, herself, better-fed than most, 1905 onwards, as my grandfather was a Master Butcher .........
• Eevin commented on Just plain icky
  This makes me wonder about the feedback between pathogen and cultural evolution. Pathogens that are passed on by person-to-person contact tend to be less virulent/aggressive. The classic example is cholera. If its main vector is water it needs to be very toxic to kill everything else that lives in the water. If the vector are humans, the varieties that leave the host "healthy" enough to have contact with other humans tend to proliferate. Furthermore, we need to take into account that the immune system requieres a level of exposure to immune challenges to mature correctly and avoid autoimmune diseases. If...