Nationwide Revolt Against Dangerous Vaccines Accelerates, page 7

"Most people believe the decline of tuberculosis is due to the introduction of the antibiotic. But our perspective is wrong, our time frame is wrong, and our conclusion is wrong as well. Most people are, in effect, looking only at a few exciting and vivid happenings within their lifetime, the past forty to fifty years, basing their conclusions on this familiar but very restricted evidence.

A longer view reveals that most of the total decline of deaths from tuberculosis since the 1800s occurred before streptomycin was first introduced. By 1945, 97 percent of the cases had already been eliminated, leaving only the remaining 3 percent to be improved by the modern medical treatments. The dramatic emptying of the hospitals that many of us and our parents have observed, then, wasonly the very end of the massive improvement.

Tuberculosis is not unusual: Similar reductions occurred with pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, measles, and scarlet fever. Whooping cough(pertussis) was rampant in the late 1800s, killing over one in each thousand children. Yet today deaths from whooping cough are rare. Once again, credit often goes to the pertussis immunization, which was introduced in the 1950s. But by that time the death rate had already fallen by 90 percent.

Polio is, of course, a notable exception. This viral disease was rare before the late 19th century, but since then has occured in epidemics. The death rate from the disease, along with the incidence of crippling disabilities, dropped dramatically following the introduction of the polio vaccine in 1956. Nevertheless, the trendin death rates from nearly all the infectious diseases was markedly downward, with the majority of the decline occuring before the introduction of effective medical therapies or immunizations.

Since most of the improvement occurred before the devlopment of specific medical interventions, what accounts for this decline of the infectious diseases? The advances in agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed people to eat much more varied and nutritious foods. Better nourished people had better immunity, too, and could thus resist better the infectious diseases. The farmer, not the doctor, was most important.

Other interventions helped: The purification of water, improved sewage disposal, and better food hygiene together account for roughly one-fifth of the total decline in infectious disease mortality. Pasteurization of milk, the food most likely to spread disease, was probably the major reason for the decrease in deaths from gastroenteritis and for the decline in infant mortality from diarrheal diseases from about 1900. Again, it was a social change, led by the food handler and sewage engineer rather than the heroics of the doctor, that deserves the credit.

Medicine has made some contribution to health, but its interventions in diseases have been greatly overemphasized as to their real effectiveness and worth to society. The contemporary health and medical effort has, in large part, been misdirected, misspent, and its successes misattributed.

The question of what improves health needs to be turned around entirely from our emphasis upon the relief of sick individuals. People are healthier today not because they recieve all this well-publicized better treatment when ill, but simply because they tend not to become ill in the first place.

It is not as profitable as we imagine to focus almost exclusively upon "specific etiology" of diseases, spending all our research funds to isolate identifiable agents of diseases, whether they be germs, viruses, or, according to one of the terms currently in vogue, "stressors." We should rather consider the ways in which organisms remain stable in the changing world of emergencies, germs, and threats---stable to resist infection and other disorders. We might then discover the way this resistance can be strengthened.