Idiotic comment of the week

I wonder what we were doing before 50,000 years ago?

Dying of iatrogenic diseases. Then the secret of not seeing doctors was found, and people lived happily until quite recently when it was lost again.

That could explain certain cave paintings ….

Kind of like saying, “sure my magic carpet doesn’t fly my anywhere, but at least I won’t die in a plane crash with it.”

More like saying “sure my magic carpet won’t fly me off the top of this active volcano, but at least I won’t die in a plane crash with it.”

Stupidest Headline I’ve Seen in Quite a While(courtesy of Mike Adams, NaturalNews – where else?):”Massive US health care reform bill contributing to deforestation:1,990 pages and 19.6 pounds of paper.”(11/8/09)

It’s not like ‘wash your hands and eat well’ are bad advice, they just are woefully insufficient. It’s like saying ‘drive defensively and you’ll survive any crash — you don’t need all those safety devices like seatbelts and airbags on your car’. True, not driving like a maniac and assuming people on the roads can be idiots will prevent some crashes, and mitigate others, but there’s always going to be that patch of ice, or the pickup out of nowhere, or deer.

(For that matter, airbags do hurt people when used blindly, which is why you note when they’ll do more harm than good in a crash and turn them off, not just blindly read about airbag injuries and assume they are worse than getting hit in the first place.)

Well since Vaccination started in the 18th century I wouldn’t chock it all off to public health improvements.

Interestingly the first vaccines killed off something like 10% as many people as the regular infection and still people wanted vaccines.

These days, people freak out if a vaccine has a possibility of being 0.00001% as deadly as the disease.

“On a per capita basis, on the other hand, not so much.”

I’m not so sure even that’s true. It probably depends on your definition of iatros, but I can imagine a “healer” 50,000 years ago desperately trying out one herb after another on dying children, and accidentally poisoning a few of them.

As I just posted as commenter 329(!) over at the original thread:

Orac,
Nevermind “Idiot Comment of the Week”, you clearly need to create an “Idiot Commenter of the Year” award for the brians. I say “brians” because I’m fairly certain that there are several different people posting on the same spittle-flecked keyboard over at AOA, or perhaps Dr. Buttar’s basement.

One of the posters is just a frothing loon who can’t spell or punctuate. One of them is just as loony as the first, but less frothy and has some command of English which includes the use of capital letters and diacritical marks (in the correct places). I haven’t identified a distinct third brian, but the sheer volume of spume is just too much for one person to generate.

That said, perhaps Occam’s Razor should be applied, in which case brian is probably just a lone poster in his parent’s basement, jacked up on Red Bull and Jolt with his tinfoil hat screwed on just a bit too tight. This scenario might explain the multiple personality effect.

Whatever the source of these posts, their vast numbers, utterly credulous nature, slightly off-target snark and conspiratorial ardor places them among the pantheon of posters worthy of the soon-to-be coveted “ICOY”.

I am paralyzed with fear that this will induce the other idiot commentors (doctrinalfairness) to try and win the award.

If most humans didn’t live past 40 50,000 years ago, why do all women who go through menarche also go through menopause at 55? There’s a 15 year discrepancy. Is it because males died significantly younger than women?

Actually, the anti-vax position tends to skew towards widely accepted, fluffy New Age woo among college educated, well to do parents. Who do occupy positions of power. Who do have the ability to exert significant influence.

Exactly. And due to their well-financed and aggressive PR campaigns, they have an enviable presence in both the print and television media, where they have been able to exploit the journalistic favoritism paid to controversial, maverick ideologies, david v. goliath stories, ‘D-list actress finds a *CAUSE*’ drama, and the like. In my opinion, the failure of science-based medicine advocates to respond soon enough or often enough to these people is partially responsible for their current level of success.

And, TheRaven, please note that the majority of the responses to the antivax posters on this blog aren’t merely to try and reach the trolls themselves (indeed, in most cases we recognize almost immediately this is would be an exercise in futility), but to provide counterpoints for the fence-sitters to weigh against the glut of antivax fearmongering they’ve absorbed from friends, or for the pro-vaccine laypeople who recognize the batshit insanity of the opposition but don’t know enough science to counter them.

It’s a growing movement. It’s important not to be silent and dismissive of this lunacy when health and life is at stake to this regrettable degree.

“Are you really comparing life 350 years ago to life today?”

Well, it makes a lot more sense than comparing life 50,000 years ago to life today. Many diseases that we vaccinate for did exist 350 years ago but did not exist 50,000 years ago, e.g., measles and chicken pox (they spread person-to-person, create permanent immunity, and have no animal reservoirs, so they die out in small populations). We are exposed every day to a lot more people (and thus, communicable diseases) than was normal 50,000 years ago, and much more comparable to the numbers one would encounter 350 years ago.

To be fair, in the 1600s people didn’t really wash their hands to speak of. Of course, plenty don’t now…

I’m sure someone by now has thoroughly demolished the common argument that improved sanitation and increased standards of living — rather than vaccines — were what knocked down the levels of the infectious diseases that used to kill so many. (I’ve heard this argument again and again from anti-vaxxers.) Where can I find a link to a thorough, careful takedown of this myth?

Are you really comparing life 350 years ago to life today? Antiseptic medical care was practically nonexistent. Infrastructure was woefully inadequate. Changes in the modern diet certainly began to occur, and like all adaptation, it has occurred very slowly – and not all of it good. Yet, here you are, acting as if these changes had positively nothing to do with life expectancy or susceptibility to any given pathogen. Rubbish, at best – intellectually dishonest at worst

I didn’t see anyone making that argument,only that improved medical care (and in latter days vaccinations) surely were a component in what is undoubtedly a multifactorial answer.If I’ve read wrong please show me the quote.This post appearedto be a response to “live right and fight off viruses the old fashioned way” which is patently absurd as the old fashioned way didn’t include any of these factors( hygiene, improved nutrition or potential for same, improved medical care). This begs the question, “What is the ‘old fashioned way’?” And to Azkyroths point yes, I don’t think the few handwashing studies I’ve seen have been very encouraging.

Re the canard about sanitation and lifestyle bringing down death rates before vaccination: I was there.

I 67 years old. I grew up in the time before vaccination was available for most of our childhood diseases, the 1940s and early ’50s. (Some vaccinations came along only in time for my own children.)

My mother was a nurse. She was fanatical about sanitation and proper nutrition. No junk food, no overeating, no skipping veggies. And she taught me how to scrub for surgery. As a daily clean-up task.

Still, I and my brothers came down with measles, chickenpox, mumps. I got typhoid and rheumatic fever from the ever-present strep. One brother got polio, thankfully without serious complications or residuals.

We weren’t unusual. We lived in dread of polio; I had seen many children with residual paralysis and deformities from it. Many ended up in the iron lung, entire ward-fuls of kids. Many died.

Many died of whooping cough, pertussis, too. Does anybody even remember whooping cough now? It was frightening; the hopeless, unceasing, racking cough, convulsing the whole body. (The “whooping” in the name comes from the “Whoop!” sound made by the sufferer, usually a small child, as they tried to catch a breath after a bout of coughing.) Children died, eventually, of exhaustion. My father lost his brother that way. We watched all coughs carefully in those days.

Then the vaccine came along. What a relief for parents!

Everybody got measles. We had to sit in a darkened room, no TV, no reading, for two weeks (over Christmas!) to avoid eye damage.

Boys who got mumps before puberty were lucky. If it came later, they could end up incapable of fathering children.

Young women feared German measles, which would damage unborn children in the womb.

TB was rampant. A relative died of it. “Galloping consumption”, we called it in those days; sometimes it took an apparently healthy person in a few short weeks.

There was still no vaccine for chicken-pox in the early ’60s, when my children were toddlers. I watched the disease march through an entire children’s ward in the hospital where my son was for syndactilia correction. All surgery was halted, all visitors gowned and masked, all discharges postponed, the entire ward under quarantine, until a week after the last case had subsided. Every single kid got it. None died; at least people didn’t usually die of chicken-pox. They were just miserable. And then they grew up and came down with shingles from the virus still in hiding in their bodies. Painful.

Sure, that’s anecdotal. But it’s a report on the general state of things not so terribly long ago, in this well-fed, well-cared for developed world.

People have such short memories, these days.

Would someone care to explain HOW eating a healthy diet is enough to stop the spread of infectious diseases, exactly?

I especially loved the commenter’s vague recommendation to “live healthy”. Would this not include regular physician appointments and immunizations?

Excellent post, Susannah. I may reference it in the future for those occasional idiot parents who say “Pertussis isn’t so bad!”

@ 12:

Interestingly the first vaccines killed off something like 10% as many people as the regular infection and still people wanted vaccines.

I was interested whether the death rate was really that high and found a very interesting article about the history of small pox.

Two to three percent of variolated persons died of smallpox; became the source of a new epidemic; or developed other illnesses from the lymph of the donor, such as tuberculosis or syphilis [39]. Nonetheless, case-fatality rates were 10 times lower than those associated with naturally occurring smallpox, and artificial inoculation was widely practiced until Jenner’s discovery; indeed, Jenner himself was variolated at 8 years of age. The primary side effect of the procedure was the appearance of smallpox itself; however, in 1722, in one of the first applications of statistics to a medical and social problem, James Jurin [40] observed that the smallpox-associated case-fatality rate was 1:14 in noninoculated children and 1:91 in inoculated children.

Another article shows that anti-vaxxers didn’t change much since the 18th century:

Much publicity and some opposition by the clergy and the medical profession followed. The Reverend Mr. Edmund Massey in a sermon entitled “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation,” which was delivered on 8 July 1722 from the pulpit of the Parish Church of St. Andrew’s Holborn, referred to variolation as “a diabolic operation which usurps an authority founded neither in the laws of nature or religion and which tends to anticipate and banish Providence out of the world and promotes the increase of vice and immorality.” The surgeon Legard Sparham in a pamphlet entitled Reasons against the Practice of Inoculating the Smallpox, which was published in 1722, argued against inserting poisons into wounds and bartering health for diseases (96).

Chris C. #36
Thank you. Please do pass it on. I’d hate to see these plagues come back.

Chris (there is more than one of us!):

I’m sure someone by now has thoroughly demolished the common argument that improved sanitation and increased standards of living — rather than vaccines — were what knocked down the levels of the infectious diseases that used to kill so many. (I’ve heard this argument again and again from anti-vaxxers.) Where can I find a link to a thorough, careful takedown of this myth?

I don’t think there is a single link to this information, because there are so many tangents to this point.

Polio has already been pointed out with a link to a very good history (short story, sanitation delayed infection with polio virus to a point past when it was still mild… before sanitation most babies were infected and they were not so very infected).

Sometimes I bring up the fact that measles, which was becoming rare before a certain fraudulent Lancet paper was misrepresented by its author, returned to Japan and England in numbers large enough to become endemic (and is coming back to Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland and other countries). I ask if the increase of measles was due to a sudden reduction of vaccination or a declination of vaccination.

I never really get a good answer.

Sometimes I get stupid answers like polio is now called meningitis, or that Hib is called something else. At that point you realize you are dealing with a whale.to/naturalnews nut, and no amount of reasoning will penetrate into whatever gray matter they possess. All you can do is silently laugh at them, while you hope that any information will be useful to reasonable people who were first intrigued by their silly arguments.

There is a strong movement afoot among the worried wealthy to “get back to nature”. People romanticize about going “back to the good old days” all the time. For most of them its just a desire to return to their childhood. For some, like the referenced commenter, they wish to return to pre-technology times, when they didn’t have the choice of 7 varieties of rice at the grocery, or have to worry about “western medicine” because it didn’t exist yet. Most of them realize it is a fool’s wish, and when pressed, accept that no, they really wouldn’t want to live without technology after all.
Some are even self-deluded enough to believe they really do want to live without technology and without science. Now, if only they would move to some remote locale where they could have what they want without dragging the rest of us down with them. They would die off in a few years and relieve the surplus population.

Which would obviously be why all those paleolithic and neolithic burial sites are full of babies, children and people in their 40s. Because they lived such happy, healthy lives, right? :-/

I got to see skeletons excavated from a neolithic site, once; rickets, lesions in jaw bones from tooth infections, one very badly healed broken arm, and in every one damage from parasites. Yay.

Yup. I’ve yet to hear of any skeletons of eighty-year-olds found in these sites.

And yes, if sanitation was all it took to stop polio, then rich Twentieth Century Americans like FDR would never have caught it.

Furthermore, as Historypunk has pointed out, life for troops in George Washington’s army wasn’t exactly sanitary — yet once they started getting inoculated against smallpox, the rate of pox dropped dramatically.

Here’s an interesting write up of a study in human evolution that considers the cost/benefit of establishing an optimal age for menopause:
http://primatediaries.blogspot.com/2007/09/evolution-of-menopause.html

Sorry if my initial response to Jonathan was flippant. I honestly didn’t know what he was asking, and the question as posed seemed to posit some effect of the male lifespan on the female reproductive cycle. My bad. It’s definitely an interesting subject. I’d love it if Dr. Amy were to do an SBM post about this at some point.

1.
Nomen nescio, I’d be interested in just how Christianity decreased infanticide by exposure. There’s quite a bit of it going on in the US today, even though it is quite illegal here. The perps are typically very young women who had unwanted pregnancies. If anything, Christianity makes these unwanted pregnancies more prevalent…

No, I think infanticide is seen as evil because of moral inflation which occurs as standards of living and life expectancy rise. What a prior generation might have seen as “the way things are” becomes a horror to a more comfortable, affluent generation. “Each child as special” is a meme that can only exist when households have very few children.

2.
It would be a horrible mistake to assume that vaccine refusers are the ignorant poor. The poor are the reason that doctors push multiple vaccines at once, running roughshod over parents. This is because they “can’t be trusted” to continue returning for prenatal care. (Because of their jobs/lack of transportation/barriers to receiving care.) Middle class parents of course are insulted by and resist this monolithic and authoritarian standard of care and so begin refusing vaccines simply because they do not think they or their child should be “forced” to do anything. The herd immunity argument only brings out the resistance more.

Wakefield and so on then come in for the really evil act II, providing a rationalization for the middle class parent’s inchoate emotions, taking the grumblers to outright resisters, leading to the outbreak of what should have been preventable, often deadly disease. Therefore it is very important to impress upon these generally well-informed people just how dangerous measles, pertussis, etc, are, and make it clear to them that low vaccination rates will end up signing the death warrant of those children who don’t develop immunity from the vaccine. These facts should be hammered again and again until they stick.

Let’s face it, the middle class is a bourgeois, and the bourgeois are inclined to be piggish. If Mommy Oinks gets it through her noggin that little Skyler could DIE if enough kids at the school aren’t vaccinated, your vaccine refusenik will become a vaccine crusader.

3.
Toxins. A favorite Boomer woo. It’s not hard to see how they acquired these beliefs, what with the fact that they grew up being exposed to really toxic shit (lead in the gasoline! Carbona! cyclamates!) promoted as being the awesome wonders of science. They’re a little skeptical now. And it only takes a little dash of lazy thinking to accept the idiotic idea that bodyfat comes from toxins in the environment settling in your body rather than from eating too much. Cut out the coffee cake AND the coffee enema, and maybe you’ll get somewhere. That woo about detox-spas-cleanses-whatever is getting really nauseating–we need some faked ford pickup fire tv journalism about deaths from chelation and coffee enemas. Now THAT’s infotainment!

4.
Part of the reason the elites believe woo woo is that they have liberal arts degrees. In HS and college they aren’t required to learn much if any science. It involves math, which liberal arts majors are allergic to, and since nobody is making them do it … well … so much for being part of the reality-based community. Instead, they study the “history of ideas” and “western canon” where they spend valuable classroom hours on stupid, discredited ideas about physics, physiology, psychology, social science, and so on. Proper medical science exists only as a thread until about 150 years and most of the major advances within the last 50 years, so naturally none of this is known to any of the deep thinkers they are supposed to study and regurgitate in detail. Even if they study “moderns” like WEB DuBois and Sartre their view of human nature is either purely political or involves Freud/Jung-influenced I-pulled-this-out-of-my-ass-after-smoking-hash attempts at understanding human nature/psychology. Your typical liberal arts major leaves school with the impression that thinking deeply about something in the coffee house will result in profound insights that will change the world. They have a passing familiarity with logical fallacies–from a rhetorical point of view–but no notion as to how one sets out to construct and test a hypothesis in order to advance human knowledge. The medical, neurological, and evo-devo advances in our understanding of human behavior, the origin of morals, and decision-making are completely unknown to them. Heck, the germ theory of disease is just an “idea” which can be tossed out in a passing fancy, just as one might discard Hobbes for Rousseau.

I once talked to this “deep” musician dude who had so little practical knowledge that he didn’t understand the mathematical relationship between string or tube length, frequency, and pitch. He kept saying “wow” to 9th grade physics. A grown man!

Oh, and although Galen is in the Western Canon, I don’t think he’s much read outside pre-med majors. It’s much more likely that a liberal arts major has wasted a severe number of braincells on Descartes (and I don’t mean his valuable contributions to mathematics). When really, those brain cells were much better wasted on beer. *g*

Many of these people go on to be journalists and other “elites”. They think they are well-educated because they’re well edjumacated with all the wrong, muddled, misleading, and misogynistic drivel that’s been sold as pure gold by some men in muu muus and silly hats over the centuries. In fact, today the putrid stench of these rotted old theories is so bad that the prof often affects the pose of criticizing the dreck, but when you’re knee-deep in shit it not only gets in your clothes but little flecks of it land in your nostrils… I naively took one of these classes and found myself trying to explain a simple point of mathematics to the prof when he was expounding on Alexander Pope and the ladder of creation. Of course Mr. Prof thought the idea was absurd–truly! But he himself was a giant ignoramus who could not comprehend the difference between a finite number and an infinite number, something any 12-year-old school child could explain. Er, that is, had they read “1, 2, 3, Infinity…” by George Gamow, and I will have you know that a goodly number of 12-year-olds with mathematically, technically, or scientifically minded parents have!

Is there no value in this old stuff? Well, sure there is, that’s why we have professional historians, but it’s idiotic to waste millions of young minds on hours upon hours of muck while not exposing them to the best our science has produced. Even allegedly “scientific” majors do a cruddy job… in 1997 when I was in college I was subjected to Psych majors doing “subliminal message” experiments with the classic “flashing word” crap they picked up from some movie. IT DOESN’T WORK. It doesn’t even have anything to do with the original definition of subliminal messages. IT’S PLAIN STUPID. Why not teach them all how to make their own home dowsing kit? Honestly.

@ not a gator

Sadly, I agree with much of what you wrote. However:

Many of these people go on to be journalists and other “elites”.

You have your scare-quotes transposed in this statement — “journalists” such as the talking-heads that comprise the mainstream commentariat* certainly deserve to be lumped into the derisive category you’ve constructed.

In contrast, actual journalists — whether the product of your hated liberal arts curricula or otherwise — perform a literally vital (and largely thankless) task in society, and some of them even demonstrate a firm grasp of logic and the rudiments of the scientific method.

Baby ≠ bathwater.

* And are themselves part of the elite, regardless of the demographics of the brands they respectively represent.

[N.B. I am not a journalist, nor is anyone in my immediate family.]

My mother, who is in her 80s, liked to tell people who talked about “the good old days” of natural medicine about her brother, who died at 9 of amoebic dysentery, and seeing wards full of children and adults in iron lungs, thanks to polio.

I remember as a kid in the ’70s, the number of special schools that existed for children who had become deaf or blind because of HIB. I also remember the real fear my mother had when we got various at the time inevitable childhood diseases – I got chicken pox, measles, and mumps, my brother got whooping cough, measles, and chicken pox, and my sister, who was slightly immune compromised, had to be kept isolated (which was tough because she was special needs, and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t be with us).

My mother says that being able to get the polio vaccine for all three of us was *amazing*, and wonderful, and that she could look forward to us growing up.

She also thinks anti-vaxxers are *insane*. I think their stupidity has not hurt them yet, and when it does, they’ll change their minds pronto.

I once talked to this “deep” musician dude who had so little practical knowledge that he didn’t understand the mathematical relationship between string or tube length, frequency, and pitch. He kept saying “wow” to 9th grade physics. A grown man!

There might be something more to your statement, but speaking as a musician myself, you don’t need to know the relationship between string/tube length, frequency, and pitch to be able to play; you don’t even need to know theory to play, which is far more practical. (Doesn’t hurt, though.) This doesn’t exactly seem like a useful example, especially given your derisive “9th grade physics” comment (many schools don’t offer any sort of physics to lower grades, if they offer it at all).

If people did a little research into their own family history, they could find some pretty unhappy news about the “good old days.” For instance, my mother’s mother died when Mom was 6 months old, probably of TB, in 1915. Hy great-grandmother on my father’s side died when my grandfather was barely 2 years old, perhaps from an infection. His step-mother gave birth to nine children; only four survived to adulthood. Two had died before age one. That was all before 1880.

My father’s elder brother went swimming one day at age 32, got some kind of infection and died a few weeks later. That was in the 1930s. My dad had scarlet fever as a child, which left him with a heart murmur. It kept him out of combat in WWII, but contributed to his eventual death at age 76 after his second heart valve replacement.

Every family has these stories, even, as we know, the New York Roosevelts. What we need is more “old folks” reminding us of how bad the “good old days” really were.

Chris @ 43 and everyone discussing sanitation vs. vaccines – my partner took a course recently taught in the engineering department. The engineers very much like to take credit for reducing disease by developing sanitation systems. As Chris said, they are probably right in regards to certain diseases, mainly those transmitted by contact with feces. I suspect that the anti-vaxxers, given their incredibly poor understanding of diseases, don’t have any idea that the benefits conferred by city planning and the benefits conferred by vaccination barely overlap.

And not a gator – get over yourself. I have a liberal arts degree (US History) and I’m familiar with basic scientific concepts and critical thinking. I suspect that those who had no interest in critical thinking in the first place actively avoid it during their college years. Most of those liberal arts majors never end up working in their field, so they don’t exactly have to master actual research, analysis, or theory.

@#50:

I’d be interested in just how Christianity decreased infanticide by exposure. There’s quite a bit of it going on in the US today, even though it is quite illegal here.

at levels comparable to what you’d see when (1) it is a socially accepted way of choosing which children to raise and which not, while (2) there exist no reasonably effective methods of birth control, and (3) no effective social safety net to take on unwanted infants and raise them in your stead? i would be extremely surprised to find the numbers remotely similar. in fact, that claim seems so extraordinary to me that i’ll have to ask you for some evidence.

as for how christianity reduced infanticide, the religion made murder a crime (in most cases) even as it rose to become politically dominant all over Europe and somewhat beyond. it enforced its dogma relatively strictly, while at the same time ensuring that dogma would be preached as the only morally acceptable way to live, making living in abject poverty with however many infants you could manage to keep alive be considered a virtue of sorts.

pre-christian cultures viewed things rather differently; in them, the majority of people might still suffer abject poverty, but they usually weren’t threatened with hellfire everlasting (and execution more immediate) for abandoning an infant to die. christianity, by and large, was successful in convincing people they would indeed burn in hell for such acts.

The perps are typically very young women who had unwanted pregnancies.

when we speak of “unwanted pregnancies” today, it carries inescapably the undertone of “could have been averted”. when discussing societies of more than one or two centuries in the past — or far enough out into the third world, even today — a pregnancy might still be/have been unwanted, but the connotation of preventability just isn’t there in any comparable fashion. that means the social stigma attached to the events, and to what one might do in response to such events, are not easily compared.

I think infanticide is seen as evil because of moral inflation which occurs as standards of living and life expectancy rise.

if this were true, infanticide ought to have been more acceptable in western Europe during the high middle ages than during antiquity and late antiquity. that should be possible to provide evidence for, and the claim is extraordinary enough that i feel justified in asking you for some.

I think the idea of menopause as a “feature” added to a default female without menopause is misguided. To me is seems much more likely that as humans evolved a long life (i.e. the delayed senescence of all organ systems), the delayed senescence of the female reproductive system didn’t provide enough of a reproductive advantage for it to be selected for.

Prolonging life, the delayed senescence of all organ systems, has to be more difficult than the delayed senescence of a single organ system (female reproduction).

my sister’s a rabid anti vaxxer, despite growing up in the same years I did (younger by 3) and yet, she doesn’t recall the HiB outbreaks, the whooping cough, mumps and chicken pox that went through our communities as recent as 20 years ago.

She has no clue just how serious these can be, but she herself was vaccinated.

I don’t know how to explain to her why it’s important that her son get these shots, but she’s convinced all science is gonna get us, fueled by the cult of celebrity non vaxers.

Meanwhile everyone around her is scrambling to get seasonal flu shots. So in essence, we’re protecting her empty head and she doesn’t know it.

If someone could please tell me how to explain this to someone with a jr high level grasp of science, I’d sure love it.

@ wheatdogg: Yes! Last week (@PalMD’s place), I commented that we might use *personal* stories from elders and *emotional* stories about present-day higher-risk people as a way to combat woo.From my own family history:c. 1900, my grandmother had to live with her aunt in NYC, because her mother, upstate,had TB and eventually died;my *other* grandmother lost a young child to influenza in 1918; my father’s sister died of infection following appendectomy;my maternal aunt lived with heart valve damage, following (probably)scarlet fever-her son and daughter sustained similar(albeit milder) damage.All of these people were/are at least middle-class and reasonably well-educated for their time.

Well, no — chimps can live into their 50s too — but even though most of them don’t, of those that do, they stay fertile the whole way, even after they enter senescence. The key issue is senescence. Human fertility stops before senescence, the only mammalian species I can think of off the top of my head where that happens. And there is a whole heck of a lot more going on in menopause than just “running out of eggs”!!! In fact, we DON’T run out of eggs — we still have plenty of eggs, way more than will mature in a lifetime — but hormone production goes through this whole shift-and-shutdown in a way which means we won’t use them any more. That is different; it is not unreasonable to ask why we do that.

Let’s just get this straight …

In order to remain ‘healthy’, we should:

– Inject ourselves with mercury and aluminum.
– Inject ourselves with multiple live viruses at one time.
– Inject our healthy babies with the Hep B vaccine (unnecessary) when they are hours old.

Really? Ok, Orac… Whatever you say…. Too bad that only leads to more autism, food allergies and autoimmune diseases. Way to go!

May I make a suggestion? ….wash your hands, exercise, eat well, live healthy, & fight off bacteria and viruses the old fashion way (like humans have done for 50,000 years.)

Yeah, because that worked so well, say…350 years ago.
————————-
Orac, the London of the 17th and 18th centuries was not a world of organic farmers markets and 24 hour fitness centers. Let’s see how Dickens describes life in a typical London slum:

rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob’s Island.
——————————-
As for prehistoric humans 50,000 years ago, it was uncommon for them to live past age 40.

So, yeah, it would be a really good thing to go back to how we “kept microbes at bay” 50,000 years ago. That worked so well, didn’t it
———————————
Microbes probably weren’t much of a problem pre-neolithic revolution, so I don’t know where the 50,000 years comes in.

Anyway, just out of curiosity, and I’m not disagreeing with the number, but does anyone have any good data regarding the widespread belief that cavemen lived to twenty. After all the bible speaks of some who lived as long as 900 years.

In order to remain ‘healthy’, we should:

– Inject ourselves with mercury and aluminum.
– Inject ourselves with multiple live viruses at one time.
– Inject our healthy babies with the Hep B vaccine (unnecessary) when they are hours old.

Really?

Sure, why not? Can you provide any actual reason to doubt it? Aside from blatent assertions (hint: if you can find an ACTUAL connection between vaccines and autism, you will be the first to do so)

(let me just note, you discount Travis for not knowing the Heb B story (I know very well what you are implying, but I also know why it is irrelevant), but you know what they say about glass houses; your mention of “aluminum” tells ME that you have no clue what is going on (calling aluminum oxide aluminum makes about as much sense as calling table salt chlorine))

We put a lot of stuff in our body that doesn’t sound good when you consider their technical names, but are essential for good health. Tactics of “ooooo, evil chemicals” don’t scare people who know what’s going on. Got something useful to contribute?

“Sure, why not”?

LOL! Sure, why not inject yourself with mercury and aluminum – it’s perfectly safe!

ps. Except it isn’t… There are even what you would call “peer reviewed science in respectable journals” which shows us that. Have you missed them?

Chris

Polio has already been pointed out with a link to a very good history (short story, sanitation delayed infection with polio virus to a point past when it was still mild… before sanitation most babies were infected and they were not so very infected).
————————–
I’m always amused when someone brings up the cleanliness theory of polio. How would you explain the fact that:

“Polio cases appeared in both overcrowded slums and sparsely populated suburbs.”[Dirt and Disease P15]

Anyway, just out of curiosity, and I’m not disagreeing with the number, but does anyone have any good data regarding the widespread belief that cavemen lived to twenty.

They can tell by looking at burial sites, and determining likely age at death from the bones.

After all the bible speaks of some who lived as long as 900 years.

It’s good to know what you consider data, Sid.

“Have you missed them?”

There’s peer reviewed journals that show that the mercury and aluminium compounds used in vaccines carry an excess cost when injected in the pattern and volumes typically used in the vaccination schedule, in comparison to the risk from vaccine preventable infections?

Reference them.

You claim they exist, so reference them.

Hhmm… I think someone forgot how we humans owned the smallpox virus with a massive vaccination program.

@Sid Offit

Another disease [TB] wiped out without vaccination

Not exactly wiped out. Still rather a problem, actually, particularly as antibiotic strains are becoming more prevalent. And, there aren’t any really good vaccines for it. BCG is not particularly effective and it frequently results in recipients testing positive for TB when they are skin tested. Lots and lots of research is going on right now to figure out just how TB works, how to diagnose it earlier and more accurately and how to create a better vaccine.

So why isn’t it rampant? Improved living conditions perhaps?

It’s rampant in Africa.

Whups. That didn’t contradict the point.

Tuberculosis in the United States is, however, increasingly drug-resistant.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/143089.php

Re. the TB vaccine, interestingly just found this:
http://www.news-medical.net/news/2009/02/26/46307.aspx

“Reference them.

You claim they exist, so reference them”.

Actually, it’s more of a ‘can’t be bothered with you guys’ attitude. For fun though… google alzheimers and aluminum 😉

Keep up the good work claiming that neurotoxins are good for you!

“Keep up the good work claiming that neurotoxins are good for you! ”

Not something I’ve claimed. Nor has anyone here. To suggest that anyone would is insulting to your intelligence. Yes, yours. To even indicate that you really believe that is what provaccine arguements state is to display your inability to understand the arguements regarding cost-versus-benefits regarding vaccines (and every other medication or nutracuetical, supplement or special diet).

Lying about people, much less being dim enough to lie to the very people you’re lying about, is never a clever tactic. Please refrain from doing so again, or leave if you are unable to do so.

I’m well aware of the purported link between Alzheimers and aluminium. Apart from being a irrelevant (I’d say you’re being deliberately avoidant as we both know you cannot answer the questions put to you) , the link is tenous and the supposed ‘risky’ levels are far, far in excess of that obtained through vaccines, even assuming a 100% absorbtion rate.

If you can’t substantiate your opinions then fine. Just admit to it and we won’t laugh, we’ve had grade schoolers drop by before so we’re well used to people like you here.

Oh, how else are we supposed to know she cannot be bothered with us unless she comes here and tells us? Gee, how hard is that to understand?

The stupid it burns.

Here on Orac’s blog… washing your hands, exercising, eating well and living healthy are all to be mocked and laughed at while injecting neurotoxins is the only way to health…

Please check yourselves in to your local mental health facility.

Last I checked, washing your hands, exercising, eating well…those are all supported by those here, as well as doctors in general as a part of standard medical advice.

What is laughed at, however, is when someone waltzes in spewing various claims about “toxins” without providing a single shred of evidence to support those claims.

Now, if a person were to come in, making claims, and actually providing citations to good sources to support those claims, they might be taken a bit more seriously.

Done feeding the troll, now.

The anti-vax trolls sure are a competitive lot as they vie for the coveted Idiotic Comment of the Week trophy.

Sid Offit certainly has a contender with

After all the bible speaks of some who lived as long as 900 years.

Sid:
Finally as to the the BCG vaccine, we still don’t know if it even works

Don’t effing lie, eh?

Have another study link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8602127?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_SingleItemSupl.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=3&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed

Have another — it’s got quite a good graph on p. 393:
http://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/groups/dh_digitalassets/documents/digitalasset/dh_104934.pdf

Nobody here claimed it was perfect, or even that it is a particularly good vaccine, as vaccines go — but that it does work a good proportion of the time is beyond doubt, and we have evidence of its usefulness.

@Luna_the_cat:

Finally as to the the BCG vaccine, we still don’t know if it even works

Don’t effing lie, eh?

Have another study link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8602127?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_SingleItemSupl.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=3&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed

Actually, Luna, the study above supports what Sid says 100%. Not 99%, but 100%. That’s one of the reasons we don’t use it in the USA.

Strange post and cussing there, Luna.

Well, Jay, since you’re so confident I’m sure you’ll have no problem explaining how

two meta-analyses of the published results of BCG vaccine clinical trials and case-control studies confirmed that the protective efficacy of BCG for preventing serious forms of TB in children is high (i.e., > 80%)

supports the claim that

Finally as to the the BCG vaccine, we still don’t know if it even works

Note in particular that Sid didn’t claim that data is insufficient in certain groups which the study does support. He made a BLANKET claim regarding efficacy.

And you could certainly be able to explain how

In the United States, the use of BCG vaccination as a TB prevention strategy is reserved for selected persons who meet specific criteria.

is consistent with the claim that “we don’t use it in the USA.”

Based on previous patterns of your ignoring inconvenient questions, though, I don’t really anticipate a response.

Hah, snap.

Wow, are Jay and Stone Deaf Sid the same guy? They both seem to be like the Black Knight — they keep shouting “I’m invincible!” even as their arms and legs are being hacked off.

“Here on Orac’s blog… washing your hands, exercising, eating well and living healthy are all to be mocked and laughed at while injecting neurotoxins is the only way to health…”

Please stop lying.

As Todd indicated, these are all basics for here and in general healthcare where a lot of us – myself included – have worked. To pretend to know anything about this blog yet attribute a bizarre and stupid arguement to the posters here is to distort what the original discussion was about.

The original discussion was about the claim that handwashing, healthy eating and regular exercise ONLY is better for you then modern medicine. The fallacy is twofold there. First is the assumption that modern medicine does not promote those things (it does, and several allied professions are dedicated to it as an ideal), second is the assumption that natural and synthetic are mutual opposites.

No one here has claimed that neurotoxins are ‘the only way to health’ so you can shut up on that front too.

My profession (an allied health profession) focuses on participation in constructive and meaningful activities. Hardly all about the neurotoxins.

The more you lie about us, to us, the more desperate (and dumber) you make yourself look.

Here on Orac’s blog… washing your hands, exercising, eating well and living healthy are all to be mocked and laughed at

I can’t believe you are even making this contention. Does Orac need to explicitly say that hand-washing is a good idea in addition to the vaccine, lest you fucking idiots fail to figure out that that is implied?!

Crazy asshole: We should get rid of airbags and stick with good old-fashioned seatbelts.

Non-crazy person: That comment is worthy of mockery and being laughed at. Airbags save lives.

Susie Q.: Wow, that non-crazy person is mocking seatbelts. That’s absurd!

….sigh….

Susie Q, it’s trollish to constantly lie through your teeth, even after you’ve been corrected. It’s also trollish to falsely claim to have evidence supporting your assertions, then refuse to provide it. It’s trollish to make false claims and demand other people prove you wrong, then continue repeating the same bullshit even after they’ve done so. In short, everything you’ve said here is trollish. So back under your bridge, troll.

Your own links state:

The use of BCG vaccine has been limited because a) its effectiveness in preventing infectious forms of TB is uncertain

and

Studies of the effectiveness of BCG vaccine have given widely varying results, between countries and between studies, ranging from no protection to 70 to 80% protection

As to the first, marginally careful reading of the surrounding verbiage would make clear that it’s uncertain in particular populations, not overall.

And the second is even more blatant, as the very next sentence after your quote is

However, meta-analyses have shown the vaccine to be 70 to 80% effective against the most severe forms of the disease, such as TB meningitis in children

Your cherry-picking is so blatant that the only possible reaction is *facepalm*.

Wow… You guys are nuts here! I can’t get over this place. No, seriously. Just attack, attack, attack. Those comments re: Desiree just show how evil some of you really are. It is actually pretty disturbing that there are some here who may actually be doctors … and you have this much hatred towards people? Wow. Just wow…

I think we are supposed to be unquestioning and not hurt people’s feelings by saying why they are wrong, or that their arguments have flaws (or they have made no argument at all). Asking people to provide evidence is abuse!

I’m calling shenanigans on Susie … I’m not buying her incredulous tone or her lone-voice-of-sanity-routine. I think she likely came here to deliberately be infuriating so she can generate responses that can be used out of context to prove what meanies we all are.

Ditto han’s post. Maybe the SQ troll is just a bored person making “her” own fun. I suspect she doesn’t even believe what she says, but is just spouting nonsense trying to get immortalized in Orac’s dumb quote of the week.

@LunaScott

However, meta-analyses have shown the vaccine to be 70 to 80% effective against the most severe forms of the disease, such as TB meningitis in children
————–
So, in a small segment of the population (children), it’s efficacious against a manifestation of TB that affects only 15% of those contracting the disease. Hardly enough to make a blanket statement of overall efficacy against TB. Especially since your study doesn’t even claim efficacy against the bacterium – simply one of its manifestations.

Wow, it is the “Get a life” argument. That is unoriginal!

So, Miss SusieQ, can you tell me which is the more potent neurotoxin: tetanospasmin or alum ?

Dedj, exactly, I can multitask. Currently I am reading a paper on multiple whole-genome alignments. I am learning something new and someday soon I hope to contribute something useful to science! (contribute again I mean, I do have some publications already).

Writing on here takes very little of my time, reading this takes very little of my time. I just refresh once and a while, it takes maybe 5 minutes to write a reply and that is if it is a long one.

I think Susie Q is an agent of DoctrinalFairness. SQ is more succinct and to the point, which is refreshing after the week we’ve put in with DF, but those flaming sacks of persecution she’s lobbing smell suspiciously familiar.

That was very similar to my reaction to her “Do a Google search for alzheimers and aluminum” comment. I thought, hmmm, Google University, Suzie Q is kind of like Susan Chu…it’s DoctrinalFairness (aka Susan Chu)!!!!!!!

But then I thought, wait – she actually said it without using 400 words. That can’t be DF…

That’s funny – on so many levels.

Are you basing your entire thesis – the one that says early man was decimated by rampant parasitic infection – on the recollections of a single person who, once upon at time, visited an ancient burial site on her summer vacation?
———————
Luna says, “I got to see skeletons excavated from a Neolithic site”

Sid says, “Microbes probably weren’t much of a problem Pre-Neolithic revolution”

What’s the key differences between the two sentences? The prefix PRE. See her statement was about the Neolithic era. Mine was about, that’s right, the PRE-Neolithic era
——————

was pointed out several times in comments on this very thread

No. Luna was the only one. Sorry

Well, let’s take a quick look at African diseases (and parasites, which often carry or cause diseases) with non-human reservoirs, which therefore do not rely on human population density to persist — and which could (and almost certainly did) affect PRE-neolithic populations:

malaria
yaws
pinworm
leptospirosis
trichinosis
tularemia
trypanosomiasis
sleeping sickness
tetanus (!)
salmonella
staphylococcus (!)
microbial blindness
tuberculosis (given that it has multiple animal and avian reservoirs, it can still pass to scattered hunter-gatherer populations; and I believe that evidence of TB has actually been found in paleolithic remains)
“scrub typhus”
other water-borne protozoan illnesses

…So even though diseases like smallpox, measles and mumps wouldn’t have made an appearance until after agriculture began and human density increased, with humans in constant full-time contact with domesticated animals, I think there would still have been plenty of infectious diseases available to kill people. Including a few of the more modern scourges.

-What’s the key differences between the two sentences? The prefix PRE. See her statement was about the Neolithic era. Mine was about, that’s right, the PRE-Neolithic era-

You mean there was time when all the viruses magically didn’t affect humans?

As for more evidence of parasites and parasitic diseases, there is this and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11345321?dopt=Abstract — studies indicate that tapeworm originated in humans, and were then passed to domesticated animals after the advent of agriculture.

There’s also plenty of evidence of paleolithic head and body lice, roundworm and whipworm, but too many links trip the spam-hold. Google it.

So, a great deal more evidence for parasitism out there than just my “summer vacation”, ya know. If you could ever bother to look up real information instead of just falling back on the old tried-and-true Sid strategy of “make shit up.”

Perhaps Sid is referring to that golden time when Adam was naming all the animals, nothing could die and T.Rex ate coconuts…before that nasty knowledge stuff got into our heads.

(Luna, assume sarcasm from me when dealing with Sid unless indicated)

Richard Eis: Figure that as already figured. ^_^

No worries, I was just making sure. Sarcasm is not too easy sometimes to pick up in text-based messages.

Richard – Sid did refer to biblical accounts of people living 900 years.

It looks like Jay has dropped out of the competition for the coveted RI ICOY trophy after a couple of feeble attempts.

I get all the comedy I need right here from Jay Gordon et al.

#23

Uh…because they’re now living long enough to reach this end-stage of their reproductive process?

Yes, but why would they have one in the first place if they weren’t regularly living long enough to need one. Men don’t have an end-stage reproductive cycle. Women are born with 500,000 eggs, so they can’t run out in the 40 years between the average on-set of menarche and the average on-set of menopause. All women go through menopause if they’re fertile. That implies rather strong selection in the past. Natural selection doesn’t care what happens to you after you die, so it could only select and propagate the genes for menopause if women were living long enough past menopause to make a difference in nurturing. We are, after all, a K-selected species.

#37

You’re assuming there’s a reason why women go through menopause. This isn’t actually clear, though some biologists seem to enjoy coming up with evolutionary “just so” stories to explain it. It may just be one of those things.

That might work if it weren’t something that directly effects fitness. You know, that whole unable to have more children thing. Natural selection would seem to work against that sort of thing, unless it directly added to fitness in some way

Note also that the age of menopause is highly variable, and the average today may be different than the average 50,000 years ago.

It’s not that variable. The 95% range is something like 45-60 years of age. With the exception of a few genetic and hormonal disorders, women go through menopause at an age well past the average age of mortality. 50,000 years ago, the average age of death was 40. That number dropped to 25 with the invention of agriculture. It’s only been in the last 150 years that the average age of mortality rose above that 40-year mark again. So where was the intervening generations that could be selected for a later menopause?

#39

Do we still know that ? I thought the common knowledge had evolved to thinking that pre-agricultural societies were actually healthier than later ones, because they had a more balanced diet and fewer infectious diseases (because infectious diseases need high densities and lots of inter-species contact to evolve, and hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have much of either).

As I commented above, agrarian societies life expectancy dropped to 25. The only reason agriculture spread is because it lets you support 10x the population off the same amount of land as nomadic existence.

I think Jonathan means that menopause is an event that was shaped through evolutionary forces, which wouldn’t happen if nobody lived that long. Although Calli Arcale addresses that.

Link?

#47

Actually, there is evidence to suggest that, for Western women at least, fertility started later in life and ended sooner in life than it does now: http://www.webmd.com/menopause/news/20031114/age-of-menopause-getting-later

Interesting study, but that stills leaves questions. Between the years of 1908 and 1930, the age of menopause rose by 2-3 years. Over the same period of time, though, life expectancy rose by 10-15 years. That’s a significant difference. Also, how did the study control for the effects of second-hand smoke?

#48

Here’s an interesting write up of a study in human evolution that considers the cost/benefit of establishing an optimal age for menopause:
Link

See, that’s exactly my point. Women would have needed to live 15-20 years past the average age of mortality to take advantage of the benefits of menopause. Since women are half the population, the other half, men, would have had to live proportionally shorter lives to end up with the average lifespan of 40. The average age of death among men would have had to have been around 25.

Sorry if my initial response to Jonathan was flippant. I honestly didn’t know what he was asking, and the question as posed seemed to posit some effect of the male lifespan on the female reproductive cycle. My bad. It’s definitely an interesting subject. I’d love it if Dr. Amy were to do an SBM post about this at some point.

I wasn’t implying that male lifespan effected the female reproductive cycle. I was noting that if women lived longer than the average lifespan, men must live shorter for that average, or that average would have to be wrong.

Though, it’s interesting to postulate on a species where males routinely live half as long as females. There would be nearly twice as many females as males in the total population. That seems to imply patriarchal societies were improbable at best in humanity’s past. It also implies males are driven to reckless, self-destructive behavior. Perhaps as a way of flourishing genes and attracting mates?

#59

The question answers itself. If a gene is living in a survival machine (body) that typically does live past 55 years, then if that gene brings about menopause, it would be maladaptive and would be (eventually) selected out of the population. However, if the survival machine the gene is living in typically dies before then, then the menopausal nature of it is no longer maladaptive — it can proliferate throughout the population if it causes, as part of the trade-off, even a modest improvement in reproductive success during the first 40 years of life.

In fact, due to genetic drift, it would be possible for a gene that caused menopause at 55 and had absolutely no adaptive effects to proliferate throughout the population. It has been shown that these sorts of “neutral” genes can indeed accumulate and even become dominant in a population to due to the messiness of the selection process.

So yeah, the question answers itself. Menopause-at-55 was able to evolve only because female humans usually died before then. If they didn’t, it would have been maladaptive and would have been selected out.

(And in fact, there is some evidence — very preliminary evidence, so don’t take this as gospel — that genes which defer the age of menopause are being selected for, since now those confer a reproductive advantage that they did not previously in history.)

I understand genetic drift and neutral evolution. The question is, why is menopause so universal? And also, the link above (Link) shows an evolutionary benefit to survival in a culture without modern medicine. That implies a selection that was positive, not neutral. So why were men dying so young as to lower the average age of death to 40 from 55-60?

#64

I think the idea of menopause as a “feature” added to a default female without menopause is misguided. To me is seems much more likely that as humans evolved a long life (i.e. the delayed senescence of all organ systems), the delayed senescence of the female reproductive system didn’t provide enough of a reproductive advantage for it to be selected for.

Prolonging life, the delayed senescence of all organ systems, has to be more difficult than the delayed senescence of a single organ system (female reproduction).

Most of the increase in human lifespan can be attributed to our larger size. Bigger hearts have to beat less often. All tetrapods lifespans can be measure roughly by dividing the universal average heartbeats per lifetime by the average BPM of the species. Slower heartbeats offer longer lives.

In order for tumors to grow, some cancer cells have to form blood vessels. Cancer cells that have a mutation that won’t let them form blood vessels tend to out populate those that do. They don’t have to waste energy and cells forming blood vessels. Thus the longer a tumor grows, the more likely it is to harmlessly starve from lack of blood-flow before growing large enough to kill the animal. The larger an organisms organs are, the larger a tumor can grow before becoming deadly. Thus large animals die less often from cancer.

It’s our size, that lets us live this long. Our decreased senescence is a result of our larger size.

Also, as I said earlier, our lifespans for the past 13,000 years was an average of 25. Before that, it was 40, about twice as long as a chimp.

#65

Instead of talking about the gene that “causes menopause at 55”, shouldn’t we be talking about the gene that causes fertility until about the age 55?

Instead of thinking of menopause as some new condition, think of it as the _return_ to the infertile condition with which we are born (pre-puberty). So instead of asking “What causes menopause at 55?” the question is, “Why does fertility only last until 55?” In that context, it is trivially obvious: because most women were dead by then.

Why did women’s body evolve to only be fertile until they were 55? Because they didn’t need to be fertile beyond that.

Remember, menopause is the not onset of something, it is the cessation of it.

That is the first logical assumption to make. Unfortunately, like so many logical assumptions, it doesn’t survive it’s first brush with reality. Our closest relatives, chimps, bonobos, and gorillas, don’t go through menopause when in captivity. There are great apes that have lived into their fifties in captivity without menopause. No other mammal, tetrapod, or vertebrate has a menopause. Men, the other half of our species, doesn’t have menopause. So why do women?

Menopause also isn’t the grinding to a halt of the reproductive system. It’s a systematic stoppage brought about by specific chemical cascades. It’s more like a controlled demolition of a building than the collapse of a condemned structure.

Luna

You’re wrong about so many things it’s impossible to keep up. But as to malaria and the cavemen…

http://www.malariasite.com/MALARIA/history_parasite.htm

It is argued that the entry of agricultural practice into Africa was pivotal to the subsequent evolution and history of human malaria. The Neolithic agrarian revolution, which is believed to have begun about 8,000 years ago in the “Fertile Crescent,” southern Turkey and northeastern Iraq, reached the western and Central Africa around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. This led to the adaptations in the Anopheles vectors of human malaria. The human populations in sub-Saharan Africa changed from a low-density and mobile hunting and gathering life-style to communal living in settlements cleared in the tropical forest. This new, man-made environment led to an increase in the numbers and densities of humans on the one hand and generated numerous small water collections close to the human habitations on the other. This led to an increase in the mosquito population and the mosquitoes in turn had large, stable, and accessible sources of blood in the human population, leading to very high anthropophily and great efficiency of the vectors of African malaria.

You’re wrong about so many things it’s impossible to keep up.

…heh. Projection, much?

Funny how, if I’m wrong about all those things, you home in on the one thing where there’s any debate at all about paleolithic vulnerability.

But fine, I’ll see your popular web site, there, and I’ll raise you this. It has a nice summary of research and understanding, a few pages in.

(…Also funny, in a totally unsurprising way, how you completely ignore the fact that it was neither native health nor washing nor nutrition which was providing paleolithic populations against later endemic viruses. It was scattered, mobile populations, nothing more. So much for THAT strategy.)

OMFG, I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Sid Offit on anything… but his account of the proliferation of malaria is more or less correct. Epidemic diseases like malaria, measles, bubonic plague, etc., require a high population density — and often, but not always, a reliance on livestock — in order to evolve to infect humans.

Livestock help because then a virus that was evolving in a dense population of herd animals for hundreds of thousands of years can jump to humans in its fully infectious form (swine flu anyone?). But the real key is population density. The reason is because highly virulent and contagious diseases tend to rapidly burn themselves out as the population develops immunity. Unless you have a population above a certain size, they can’t survive long term.

I don’t think this really has any bearing on the argument at hand, though. That prehistoric peoples didn’t have to deal with measles or malaria doesn’t mean their life was all wine and roses. There were PLENTY of ways to die, and plenty of them were nasty diseases. I mean, bacteria for instance don’t need high population densities to learn to infect humans…

James Sweet: I don’t think that anyone would argue that malaria became endemic before agriculture; the issue I think was whether they ever had to fight it. Given that the other great apes also have to deal with Plasmodium and our Plasmodium is far more related to chimp Plasmodium than to avian Plasmodium or anyone else’s, the working hypothesis is that the parasite followed us (probably at a fairly low level) until circumstances really allowed it to explode. As, it appears, for tapeworm. (bleah)

The point (or the deceased equine, which in this case I think I may have beaten into a red smear in the dirt) is simply that paleolithic humans would still have been vulnerable to it as a cause of death, even if it wasn’t an endemic plague. Given the reservoirs of all the types of Plasmodium and multiple host mosquito species in Africa, I think you have to stretch some to argue that it didn’t exist at all until agriculture gave it room to expand.

Well, as far as I can tell from good old “University of Google” (in other words: I *DO* know how to read a paper, from my actual university education, but this is Not My Field) — the mean age of death in various paleolithic sites around Africa and the Middle East especially appeared to range between 21 and 40. However, the mean does not give the range. Since we also know that there was a very high infant mortality (again varying between 20-65%), it makes a sort of shallow sense to me that there were probably some deaths at the upper end of the age range as well, i.e. 60+.

But sadly, I really have to go do some real work for a bit. I have some [expletive deleted] that I’m supposed to be getting done for the end of the week.

I was almost going to make a point myself about the average not necessarily being reflective of the range.

Re: The malaria thing, I hadn’t read most of the thread before I jumped in. I was so shocked to see Sid saying something that was actually accurate, I guess it affected my judgment 😀 Reading back, I see that the points I made were already covered in depth by you.

And in any case, I don’t really see how any of it would support Sid’s crackpot ideas anyway, even if we DID falsely assume that ancient peoples didn’t have to contend with many parasites…

@11 Not to give these fantastic advances short shrift, but I’m fairly sure that public health, sanitation and improvements in living standards did most of the work before the 1950s (when antibiotic were introduced, and many vaccines didn’t yet exist).

What advances in sanitation happened that made polio almost vanish after 1955? Why are the favelas of Brazil as polio-free as the USA, if living standards and sanitation are what did the work?

What happened in sanitation between 1962 and 1972 that made measles almost vanish in the USA? Was it the introduction of the blow-dryer? Flush toilets? Tampons?

Do we still know that ? I thought the common knowledge had evolved to thinking that pre-agricultural societies were actually healthier than later ones, because they had a more balanced diet and fewer infectious diseases (because infectious diseases need high densities and lots of inter-species contact to evolve, and hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have much of either).

Tangential, but earlier this year I read an odd thing concerning this in a book called Early Cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia (ISBN-10: 1588860280). The intro bit about the beginning of the Neolithic said that hunter-gathering was “the original affluent society” and the question ought be not why some societies didn’t transition to agriculture but why any did. Then, in the discussion, one learnt that at the site that was discussed in most detail, life expectancy (15ish, IIRC) and general health were utterly dismal during the purely hunter-gathering phases, while during the one phase were grown rice formed a significant part of the diet conditions improved slightly.

The lesson, perhaps, is that the Paleolithic and Neolithic each cover so much time and space that generalizations are of very limited use.

one flaw in the ongoing menopause conversation: fertility essentially ends in the early 40’s, not at 55. There is a steep decline from 40 to about 43, when most of the population becomes infertile. From 44 onward there are a few pregnancies, with sky-high rates of miscarriage and genetic anomalies. Which fits right into an average life span of 40.

Also, the main killer of women in their fertile years is pregnancy and childbirth, so women who survive to become menopausal would have a long retirement ensuring her children survive.

I’ll post some references when I’m not on my iPod.