Gasoline Alley, February 9, 1920. In 1920 there was a great deal of concern about the revival of the prior two years horrific flu epidemic.
Let me by start off by noting that I'm not saying that the Corona Virus is just a bogus scare. It might turn into a true human disaster.
We don't know that yet.
It might, but it might not. It probably actually won't.
None of which is a comfort to you if you are dying from it.
According to some statistics that are probably now completely obsolete as they change every day, there have been 37,592 confirmed cases in the Coronavirus, almost all of them in China. 814 people have died (more than that as the death toll reached 100 in one day this past week, and these figures are from January). 2,920 people have recovered from the virus after having it. Add that up and it tells us that most of the people who have been infected are infected right now.
Scary?
Well, last flu season 45,000,000 Americans were infected by the flu virus, of which 61,000 died. Over 800,000 were hospitalized. Last year was a really bad year for the flu, we'd note, and the number of Americans who died from it were about double the norm. So far, this year, between 21,000,000 and 30,000,000 Americans have come down with the flu, of which about 30,000 have died.
This, we would note, places the current flu season in the category of being a bad one. February is the worst month for the flu, normally, and we already have seen a year which would be more or less average for infection and death.
Which brings me to my point.
Yes, people worry about the flu, but not like they do strange new exotic viruses.
But the flu is a real killer.
The flu killed millions in a pandemic that we've discussed here, which raged across the globe killing tens of millions just a century ago. That pandemic still isn't understood very well, and it may never be. But if you are reading this today, you have DNA from that flu virus in you. Every living human being, save perhaps those who live in truly remote regions where it never touched, does. Today, in fact, the same strain still exists, in closely mutated form, and will make you sick. But it won't kill you.
Sooner or later there will be something like the 1918-19 Flu again, most probably. Perhaps we've developed our medical technology so far that this won't occur, but it probably will. And with the larger human population of today, it'll be every bit as bad, probably, as the 1918-19 Pandemic was. Maybe worse.
But if you were a betting medical man, the bet would be that it will be the flu. . . not Coronavirus, SARS or Ebola or any of the other viruses that the news media and the general public like to freak out about.
Indeed, while the scientific memory of the 18-19 Flu remains very strong, and causes the annual focus on the developing strain in the medical community, the scientific knowledge of the American public has bizarrely declined in recent decades to the point where while we now have vaccines that can address it, people will forgo having themselves or their children vaccinated or even treated because they are ignorant of science. Just this past week a four year old child died because his ignorant mother took advice from an Anti Vaccination Facebook group about treating him with Tamilflu. She's a moron. They're idiots. They are culpable in his death. But such things are now common in the US now, while also running around like chickens with our heads cut off about new viruses also is.
Sailor and Red Cross nurse at the site of a munitions plant explosion, October 5, 1918, wearing mask for protection against the flu.
Indeed, the ability to calculate risk is a really interesting topic, and the topic of infectious disease, and health in general, gives many such examples.
Humans, in their long history, have battled with many killer diseases. Interestingly, in earlier eras, while these diseases did scare us, rightfully, we often carried on carrying on in the face of a massive death toll anyhow. This is so much the case than modern historians now like to assert, falsely, that the news of an outbreak was suppressed.
This is very much the case with the 18-19 flu. It was bad, and communities did end up closing schools and churches, but for the most part people carried on to a remarkable degree. Now you hear all the time that the news was suppressed in the press. It most definitely wasn't. It was front page news the entire time, including the daily death toll in the community. People very much knew what was going on and just how bad it was.
Diseases like smallpox provide another example. Smallpox plagued humans for centuries and people worried greatly about it, but for the most part they carried on enduring risks we would not if faced with a similar disease today. In really desperate situations people would inoculate themselves or have themselves inoculated, risky as it involved a live vaccine, but that's because they were living and working in conditions where they couldn't avoid the disease.
American with smallpox, 1912.
The only disease that's really been like that in modern times has been the flu. It visits us every year, and some years its really bad. We know what we can do about it, but we don't worry all that much about it really, even though it remains a first rate killer.
Instead we worry about the exotic.
In recent years the first disease we really freaked out about was AIDS. AIDS is a horrific disease, but it's also largely behaviorally based. During the height of the freaking out about it there were suggestions that it was going to become airborne or the like. There was never any chance of that. Rather, it was always a sexually transmitted disease, of more than one strain. In the Western world the overwhelming majority of individuals who contracted it and still do, do so through homosexual sex. In Africa, where the strain is different, the overwhelming majority of people who contract it do so through heterosexual sex. There are definitely other ways it has been transmitted, but the key to it was sex. It's a sexually transmitted disease. As a sexually transmitted disease, it's one whose mode of transmission is an automatic limiter and it was never going to be as deadly as the flu in any one year or even close to being.
This is the case, we'd note, with all sexually transmitted diseases, all of which have increased in recent years as sexual conduct has become less and less governed by common sense, morality and science. People are bad at calculating risk.
Indeed, diseases provide interesting examples about the miscalculation of risks of all sorts. During the height of the AIDS epidemic the common advice for members of the demographic most threatened with it was to employ condoms, which given the failure rate of the same is really a poor calculation of risk. The obvious recommendation that could be made that would have completely avoided the risk was rarely given. "Avoid sex" or at least "avoid sex with people you know with certainty not to be infected" wasn't the common advice.
The flip-side of this is provided by the decades running advice on avoiding "red meat" out of cancer and other health concerns. In reality, the danger posed by red meat is very small, statistically. Abstaining from meat of all types is, on the other hand, universally dangerous to people who practice it, requiring that such persons go to great lengths to find artificial substitutes for the things they would have acquired from meat. And yet, because of this marginal risk, people abstain from meat and chose instead to incur greater health risks in the exchange.
Interesting examples of poor calculation of risks are provided by smoking and drinking as well. Drinking, as it has an interesting mixed history, is one we'll look at first.
Alcohol poses very real risks to those who consume it, which has been known for a long time. Alcohol itself is a poison. Simply drinking too much alcohol in a single setting will kill you. However, we also know that human beings have a genetically developed tolerance for the poison up to a certain level, in most, but not all, populations. That tells us, from an evolutionary biological prospective, that at some point human beings developed a tolerance for something that's a manufactured poison, for some reason. That's downright odd.
The reason for it initially seems to be that primitive beer was a food source. Liquid bread, basically. As grains aren't capable of being harvested around the calendar, beer was a way to keep it. Early beers were flat and probably heavy duty, sort of like Guinness Stout, basically. Every grain growing cultures seems to have developed them. Even early on, however, the intoxication aspect of it was known, which is reflected in graffiti in huts left by the builders of the pyramids.
Additionally, brewing beer provided a safer liquid to drink than water in many places, indeed darned near all places, that routinely brewed it. In a very primitive world water was basically safe to drink, but as soon as there were sufficient people and sufficient domestic animals belonging to those people, that changed. Water from early times up through the dawn of the 20th Century was often pretty darned dangerous.
People debate on this a bit, but basically the attention required to brew beer, or to vint wine, in and of itself, was sufficient to make it safe for consumption. So in a way, as some people like to argue, the process, rather than the alcohol, made it safe. Others say, no, the alcohol did it. No matter, which ever did it, it was safe to drink and was drank in many areas in gigantic quantities year around. Medieval European farm workers, for examples, drank liters of beer per day. Scandinavians in the Middle Ages started the day off with hot beer.
And while the Middle Ages were very full of beer and wine, European cultures continued a really heavy alcohol consumption up through the 1950s. It's really only after that it started to drop off, and for much of the original safe drink water concern reason.
But that didn't mean that Middle Ages Brew was 100% good for you. It meant the water was riskier.
In modern terms, now that the threat of the water is over, the risk calculation has really changed. Physicians debate it but alcohol consumption is somewhere between 100% risky to some degree to okay if done very moderately. Most drinkers who are more than casual drinkers exceed the recommended consumption rates routinely. There are some known health benefits to drinking, as is often cited, but as often pointed out, they're marginal. People make the risk calculation today, but frankly they probably, much like the condom example given above, err on the side of the risk, rather than the safe approach.
Alcohol isn't the only drug like this, by the way. Opium poppies were first used to season bread by Medieval Italians specifically because their lives were so hard and painful it dulled their wits. That's a hard thing to accept but it was the case. So it was like alcohol in a way. Having somewhat dulled wits is a bad deal, but the risk calculation to overcome the pain was deemed worth it. Modern poppy seed bread isn't made with opium poppies today and the risks associated with opium in any form grossly exceed a casual use such as that.
Coca leaves in the Andes actually served a similar function for natives living at high altitudes. While their physical morphology actually has evolved to endure high altitude living, it's still so problematic that adults at one time spent a lot of the day chewing on coca just to have dulled wits and therefore not endure the pain of daily living the same way. In modern times, however, the drugs that stem from coca are far riskier to use for any purpose than any calculation of risk would support.
Tobacco use, and soon marijuana use, travel the same path. Tobacco was claimed to have benefits at one time but it never really did. Marijuana use will prove to be the same. They're risky and their users grossly underestimate the very well known risk associated with them.
Indeed, diseases provide interesting examples about the miscalculation of risks of all sorts. During the height of the AIDS epidemic the common advice for members of the demographic most threatened with it was to employ condoms, which given the failure rate of the same is really a poor calculation of risk. The obvious recommendation that could be made that would have completely avoided the risk was rarely given. "Avoid sex" or at least "avoid sex with people you know with certainty not to be infected" wasn't the common advice.
The flip-side of this is provided by the decades running advice on avoiding "red meat" out of cancer and other health concerns. In reality, the danger posed by red meat is very small, statistically. Abstaining from meat of all types is, on the other hand, universally dangerous to people who practice it, requiring that such persons go to great lengths to find artificial substitutes for the things they would have acquired from meat. And yet, because of this marginal risk, people abstain from meat and chose instead to incur greater health risks in the exchange.
Interesting examples of poor calculation of risks are provided by smoking and drinking as well. Drinking, as it has an interesting mixed history, is one we'll look at first.
Alcohol poses very real risks to those who consume it, which has been known for a long time. Alcohol itself is a poison. Simply drinking too much alcohol in a single setting will kill you. However, we also know that human beings have a genetically developed tolerance for the poison up to a certain level, in most, but not all, populations. That tells us, from an evolutionary biological prospective, that at some point human beings developed a tolerance for something that's a manufactured poison, for some reason. That's downright odd.
The reason for it initially seems to be that primitive beer was a food source. Liquid bread, basically. As grains aren't capable of being harvested around the calendar, beer was a way to keep it. Early beers were flat and probably heavy duty, sort of like Guinness Stout, basically. Every grain growing cultures seems to have developed them. Even early on, however, the intoxication aspect of it was known, which is reflected in graffiti in huts left by the builders of the pyramids.
Additionally, brewing beer provided a safer liquid to drink than water in many places, indeed darned near all places, that routinely brewed it. In a very primitive world water was basically safe to drink, but as soon as there were sufficient people and sufficient domestic animals belonging to those people, that changed. Water from early times up through the dawn of the 20th Century was often pretty darned dangerous.
People debate on this a bit, but basically the attention required to brew beer, or to vint wine, in and of itself, was sufficient to make it safe for consumption. So in a way, as some people like to argue, the process, rather than the alcohol, made it safe. Others say, no, the alcohol did it. No matter, which ever did it, it was safe to drink and was drank in many areas in gigantic quantities year around. Medieval European farm workers, for examples, drank liters of beer per day. Scandinavians in the Middle Ages started the day off with hot beer.
And while the Middle Ages were very full of beer and wine, European cultures continued a really heavy alcohol consumption up through the 1950s. It's really only after that it started to drop off, and for much of the original safe drink water concern reason.
But that didn't mean that Middle Ages Brew was 100% good for you. It meant the water was riskier.
In modern terms, now that the threat of the water is over, the risk calculation has really changed. Physicians debate it but alcohol consumption is somewhere between 100% risky to some degree to okay if done very moderately. Most drinkers who are more than casual drinkers exceed the recommended consumption rates routinely. There are some known health benefits to drinking, as is often cited, but as often pointed out, they're marginal. People make the risk calculation today, but frankly they probably, much like the condom example given above, err on the side of the risk, rather than the safe approach.
Alcohol isn't the only drug like this, by the way. Opium poppies were first used to season bread by Medieval Italians specifically because their lives were so hard and painful it dulled their wits. That's a hard thing to accept but it was the case. So it was like alcohol in a way. Having somewhat dulled wits is a bad deal, but the risk calculation to overcome the pain was deemed worth it. Modern poppy seed bread isn't made with opium poppies today and the risks associated with opium in any form grossly exceed a casual use such as that.
Coca leaves in the Andes actually served a similar function for natives living at high altitudes. While their physical morphology actually has evolved to endure high altitude living, it's still so problematic that adults at one time spent a lot of the day chewing on coca just to have dulled wits and therefore not endure the pain of daily living the same way. In modern times, however, the drugs that stem from coca are far riskier to use for any purpose than any calculation of risk would support.
Tobacco use, and soon marijuana use, travel the same path. Tobacco was claimed to have benefits at one time but it never really did. Marijuana use will prove to be the same. They're risky and their users grossly underestimate the very well known risk associated with them.
Indeed, this takes us back to the vaccination topic. Are there any risks at all in being vaccinated for an infectious disease? Well, yes, but not the ones that are promoted by people whose claim to fame is having been a Playboy Photographic Prostitute. Some people do get sick from vaccinations, and indeed I'm one of them, having been put in the hospital due to an Army vaccination for yellow fever. It turned out that I was allergic to one of the constituents. And I've actually seen a person come down with a mild case of smallpox due to an Army vaccination, which must have meant that there was a little live vaccine in the vaccine we received and he hadn't been previously inoculated.
But those are rare examples and the risk run that a person has a reaction of that type are much lower than the risk posed by not getting the vaccination. Yellow Fever is really bad, and so is a full case of smallpox.
All which gets back to risk. People are bad at calculating it. Everyone runs risks every day, but people chose to freak out about the small risks such as coronavirus suddenly being everywhere or eating red meat, and forgo worrying about the ones they are seemingly acclimated to, like the flu.
But those are rare examples and the risk run that a person has a reaction of that type are much lower than the risk posed by not getting the vaccination. Yellow Fever is really bad, and so is a full case of smallpox.
All which gets back to risk. People are bad at calculating it. Everyone runs risks every day, but people chose to freak out about the small risks such as coronavirus suddenly being everywhere or eating red meat, and forgo worrying about the ones they are seemingly acclimated to, like the flu.
