Pandemics Do Not Exist (Health)

[Ishmael]

This thread is dedicated to accounting for all apparent "pandemic" phenomena throughout history with better paradigms.

[Ishmael]

As most of you know, I don't generally believe in pandemics. I've never seen one.

The great Flu pandemic of 1917 I consider a great myth. Old people who died would have died anyway. Young people who died were killed by the treatment: Over-prescription of aspirin.

But what about some of the other great "pandemics," both acknowledged and unacknowledged?

[Ishmael]

Tuberculosis and Polio

One of the unacknowledged pandemics was Polio. And also perhaps Tuberculosis. Both occurred around the same time. Well, I say they "occurred." The consensus model seems to imagine both diseases having existed in the general population throughout the existence of humanity and only with the rise of modern medicine and vaccines did they go away.

But I say that isn't the case at all.

I say both Polio and Tuberculosis were new diseases---in the sense that they were experienced throughout the wider population in staggering numbers. This, I insist, was highly unusual.

According to the Mao Clinic, "Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria that spread from person to person through microscopic droplets released into the air." I call bullshit. There are still people today who get TB and it isn't necessary to keep them quarantined. The desease is treated with antibiotics and the person goes about their daily life as usual. Doctors do not behave as though there were any great concern of it spreading around. Either way though; it wasn't the treatment that "cured" TB. It just went away on its own. No one catches it anymore.

About the same time TB became widespread, Polio was emerging in the population. And about the same time, both diseases disappeared. The extinction of Polio is universally attributed to the arrival of the first vaccines. But, in fact, the disease was already on the way out by the time the supposed vaccine arrived.

So what we have are two diseases that came out of nowhere, became endemic (some places in Ontario Canada, half the children had TB), then disappeared as suddenly as they arrived.

Was there a common cause and what was it?

I believe there was a common cause and I am confident I know what it was.

[Mick Harper]

Did you mean the Mao Clinic or the Mayo Clinic? It's a question of the right dressing.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Ishmael]

Doc Holiday, that famous personage of the Old West, suffered from TB. Not many others did at the time. Doc Holiday was a doctor. A Dentist in fact. That makes him upper-middle class.

Franklin Rosevelt had Polio. The Rosevelt family was upper class.

The two data points that led me to the answer.

[Mick Harper]

Protection from dirt and squalor in early life?

[Mick Harper]

Wet nurses/formula milk.

[Ishmael]

Good thinking. But how could infant formula be connected to TB and Polio?

An immediately apparent problem: Most areas where TB is seen in the world today practise breastfeeding and the people there live in squalor.

I have a different notion.

What we are looking for is a sociological or technological innovation, to which only the relatively wealthy had initial access, and which had/has the potential to create disease.

[Hatty]

Foreign travel. Thomas Cook wasn't available to all at first. Restricted to those with money/connections, later came package deals to enable mass travel.

[Ishmael]

Perhaps another good idea. But Doc Holiday never went anywhere to my knowledge. And people today travel the world and TB doesn't go with them.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Opium?

[Ishmael]

That's not my solution. But you're welcome to explain how opium imparted Polio to little Franklin Rosevelt.

[Ishmael]

One last clue. This will probably give the solution to someone.

The cause of TB and Polio---what destroyed the lives of millions and directly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands---is something we use every day and take completely for granted.

[Grant]

Soap