In 1880, average life expectancy in rich countries was 40 years. In 2018, in the U.S., it was 78.5 years. (Life expectancy is the average number of years a newborn would live if prevailing mortality rates remained unchanged.) In a sense, we have been granted an extra life: an added 40 years.
Because of the Covid pandemic, we’ve been made acutely aware
of the ways in which pathogens can sicken and kill us. But it has been ever
thus. We fail to appreciate the fact that we’ve been living longer because feats
of human ingenuity followed by public health measures have been protecting us from
these microscopic invaders.
For example, in London, a physician by the name of John Snow
traced cholera deaths to a neighborhood water pump, proving that contaminated
water, not foul air (“miasma”), caused the illness. Although Snow wasn’t able
to identify the specific contamination agent—later identified as a bacterium—he
was the first to study the pattern of deaths in the neighborhoods and thus to
pinpoint the culprit. In other words, he was the first epidemiologist. His
discovery led to improved sanitation facilities in London.
Discoveries by Pasteur and other scientists continued our
forward progress. Antibiotics, blood transfusions, and similar medical
interventions have saved millions of lives. But we owe the lion’s share of our
extra life not to individualized medicine but to public health measures such as
sewers and clean water, pasteurization, chlorination, and vaccines. We should
be more grateful.
For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
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