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Home » Archives » June 2006 » I have a theory

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06/07/2006: "I have a theory"


There's been a lot of attention given to the apparent increasing prevalence of a variety of long term health problems (most notable at least to me are asthma and allergies). At the same time, our health science is getting ever more proficient at curing diseases and increasing life expectancies. How can these these both be true?

It's a strange twist of logic, but I think the latter is at least partly responsible for the former.

How many of the people with debilitating medical problems would have died when they were young? 50 to 100 years ago infant mortality was a significant issue. If a person had a peanut allergy, there were no EpiPens (tm) to carry around, and they would simply die once they were sufficiently exposed. Asthma too can be deadly, although less often. If these health problems we have problems with today proved deadly enough in the past, the genes resposible for their prevalence would not have propagated as often to future generations.

As such, curing the symptoms will leave future generations as susceptible or more than we (as a whole) are. The only solutions I see are either leaving those with problems to die, which is morally repulsive not to mention in contravention to the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm", or to somehow modify our genetics such as to change what we pass down to future generations, which again has some serious ethical implications.

Admittedly, it is likely that increased environmental chemical exposure is also involved, so I am under no illusion that the above is the sole reason for the increased prevalance. Improved diagnosis and reporting of medical problems means we are now identifying these cases more often and more specifically. However, I have not heard the above explanation either exposed as completely fallacious or pointed to as a significant factor in these diseases.

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