Chadwick was a lawyer & public health advocate. Story in his words from 1838:
Orphanage. 700 kids. 1/3rd caught typhus. 30 died
Doctors say it's food but food is excellent
Chadwick brings in ventilation expert who says it's air
They ventilate. Cut deaths by 1/3
Story told of a doctor who would move TB patients out to the country for fresh air.
The ones that wouldn't go would die.
Those that would, would recover.
Armies would die in the field. Not from the battles, from the sickness.
Again, drs improved the food. Did nothing.
Chadwick stepped in, wrote letters to those in charge (familiar?) and got air improved.
The armies were saved, and returned in better health than they left.
"Replacing the foul infected air round the sick"
"By dilution in the boundless external atmosphere"
In the words of Miss Nightingale (also air advocate), "fresh air are the only protection which a nurse requires.
By the way, Chadwick championed Nightingale and encouraged her to write her book, "On Nursing", I believe.*
(*they were all reasonably well to do, but let's leave that issue for another day)
Focussing on things that did not matter were a huge sidetrack.
Again, sound familiar?
I'm talking to you: face shields, plexiglas, and surface disinfection.
--- originally posted May 2021
Chadwick actually found working class was dying earlier, generally. Not just water.
To encourage gov to do anything at all, he argued poor conditions were causing them to work less productively.
Nothing.
Ever.
Changes.
--- Dec 2021:
Public health used to be a progressive field concerned with health, not this talking head garbage we get on TV and Twitter.
Thread https://nitter.net/PChildermass/status/1474721442604404741?s=20
As I said it was early 1800s in the UK, when a lawyer (Chadwick) noticed that all the workers were dying. He convinced the ruling class (who didn't want to spend any money, of course) that heck, you'd get more labour out of them if they didn't KEEP dying.
Boom, boards of health.
Later, germ theory changed the landscape and taught people how to combat disease, which changed what they did.
This is what we are going through today, unfortunately in the middle of a wonderfully powerful and fatal viral pandemic.
[originally posted this bit Dec 2021]
A reminder, our pandemic response is headed by organizations established in the same way and with the same composition as things were in 1850.
So, no wonder we completely fail at this.
For interest, in Ontario, there are 34 boards of health. They are legally responsible for pandemic response.
Their "CEO" is a medical officer of health. So those 34 MOHs are in charge of our response.
Their credentials are, and I kid you not:
1. a year training in infectious disease, and
2. to be a doctor.
https://canlii.org/en/on/laws/stat/rso-1990-c-h7/latest/rso-1990-c-h7.html
PHAC was set up to be in charge, but isn't.
Public Health Ontario provides (terrible) technical guidance
If anyone wonders why we are terrible at this.
So, next time you listen to a random screaming public health Twitter head who keeps saying it's the fruit tray, just remember:
Sometimes it's smarter to listen to a lawyer who brings tidings from air experts.
P.S. #COVIDisAirborne
P.P.S. What's with this doctor fetish with blaming the food, anyway?
@jmcrookston I think ours has a pretty good resume.
Very interesting, thanks!
I have not looked into his personal history. I definitely recall reading more than once that he would bring experts in to examine a situation. This seems to be a trait many lack, for some reason 🙄
Average age of death of tradesperson 22!
Brutal - and can see this could only be sustainable with apprentices starting very young - start at 10, finish apprenticeship at 14, do 8 years work and then die. (Ages and periods are only guesses, not soundly based.)
Yes.
It's like living in a SciFi story where society is going bad.
Or a revisting of the #LateBronzeAgeCollapse.
"Dr. Norrie provides a summary of the fifteen currently accepted causes for the end of the Bronze Age in the Near East and then goes on to discuss the sixteenth reason—infectious disease epidemics"
Dr. Norrie provides a summary of the fifteen currently accepted causes for the end of the Bronze Age in the Near East and then goes on to discuss the sixteenth reason—infectious disease epidemics. These are the real reason that the end of the ...
"Yes but we'll get slavery bsck, right?"
- republicans
Engineer: "This has been shown to work better therefore we should do it that way."
CEO: "That will cost us money in the short term!"
Politician: "How can I implement whatever policies I feel like if I'm constrained by what works?"
Physician: "There's no RCT of that!"
It blows me away that the US Civil War was apparently the first conflict in history where more men died of enemy action than died of disease and starvation.
We get history all wrong: improving the health of troops was so little paid attention to that it makes me wonder if kings and commanders really cared about winning at all. It's bizarre.
It does seem kind of silly. They must have just thought sickness was how life was. I guess they just overstaffed all the battles to make up for the sickness and death.
Shows how little thought jt took to improve things though.
Ships (i.e. of the Royal Navy, etc.) has an interesting history with ventilation that I barely scraped ...
What is typhus? Typhus fevers are a group of diseases caused by bacteria that are spread to humans by fleas, lice, and chiggers. Typhus fevers include scrub typhus, murine typhus, and epidemic typhus. Chiggers spread scrub typhus, fleas spread murine typhus, and body lice spread epidemic typhus. In the United States, the most common type […]
Never looked closely at transmission mode. Perhaps cleaning the air also removed bacteria, as I see mention that typhus is stable and can transmit through air.
However, could absolutely have been ancillary to the air mitigations. These reports are too brief to pull more out of.
Now you have me interested in looking into this. But although I can find mention of the full body rash, and cough, I can't find any articles about whether it goes to the saliva, colonizes the respiratory tract, or exits the stool of the human.
What I'm thinking is that after the first person catches it from the louse, it may be possible to spread human to human. But again I have not been able to confirm possibility here...
And of course your hypothesis might be right
Yes, but I'm wondering if the bacteria colonize the respiratory tract or come out the human stool.
Don't do your primary research on public health sites. You'll just go round in circles. Go to pubmed.
Yes I'm saying after that, in the human. Don't worry about it. I'll find it on PubMed (or I won't find it at all).
Jonathan
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