Brian GainorDec 3
kottke.org
An Astonishing Graph. For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. (It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.) https://kottke.org/25/12/an-astonishing-graph
An Astonishing Graph

For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.

kottke.org
Dec 2 at 11:16pmkottke bot
Show thread"Mediocre Bunny" EvelynDec 3
@kottke
There's a memoir written by an American woman who lived in a tiny rural village in Iraq for several years c. 1960. She integrated into village society, avoiding men other than her husband except as allowed by custom, and befriending & being largely accepted by the women of the village.
Once when she was preparing to go home for a short visit, one of her friends, who was married but had no living children, took her aside & asked, "When you come back from America, could you please bring some of that thing they have that makes the babies live?"
Show threadThePiperDec 3

@kottke I have an interest in military history. A guerrilla war was fought in the arid Karoo between the British and the settlers. Often the only indication of minor skirmishes are the graves of soldiers in small towns.

In the graveyard of Sutherland lie a mother and her 7 children. The graves are from the early 1900's and none of the children made it past the age of 2. It vividly brought home to me the advances that medicine and baby care has made in the last 100 years.

Show threadJuggling With EggsDec 3

@kottke

I was having a conversation with my kids just this week about average life expectancy and they said they’d learnt at school in Tudor times it was mid thirties. I assumed it would have been slightly higher by that point, because that didn’t seem much different from what I recalled being told it was in the Bronze Age when I was at school. But then I remembered infant mortality statistics - and how truly shocking they were up the Victorian era in the UK.

Show threadPaul SchoeDec 3

You are right, an astonishing graph about how child mortality dropped.

But in the USA they will now reverse the trend. As the article says: child mortality is now such an 'uncommon experience that people have forgotten and want to ban vaccines.'

The USA will see many more children and parents suffering.

@kottke
#ChildMortality #Vaccines #USA

Show threadLenoraDec 3
@paulschoe @kottke a trip to an old cemetery would be an eye opener for many #antivaxxer parents if they’d bother to go. There are many tombstones of dead children before the 1960’s. If you were to look at one of my great grandmother’s tombstone you’d see she is buried with 5 of her children. Of her 8 children only 3 made it to adulthood
Show threadChucklesDec 6
@paulschoe @kottke don't think that infant mortality will be contained in the US. People travel and take diseases with them, and two of those diseases are superstition and ignorance.
Show threadSpitefully OptimisticDec 5
@kottke this is why you see low _average_ life expectancy figures for so long. It's not that people didn't live to be 70 or 80 years old, but the average is very skewed by the lots of babies that didn't make it.
Show thread@stevewfoldsDec 6
@kottke Medical knowledge reduced infant deaths in Northeast America by 1800. Harvard’s Med School started in 1782 & Dartmouth’s in 1797. Inherited an 1860s horse & buggy doctor’s greatcoat tool kit & pocket pharmacy. Still have his microscope.
Show threadJered FloydDec 6
@kottke @cstross The especially horrible thing is that the leaders making decisions (in the US) think we _should_ be going back — a perverse, unscientific belief that this has “made us weak”.
Show threadCharlie StrossDec 6
@jered @kottke Well, low infant mortality *does* mean that women aren't so ground down from popping out babies and burying them all the time that they can compete with the testicular-endowed god-fearing breadwinners for jobs, thereby making civilization implode, or something? So yeah, gotta kill more babies for Jesus.
Show threadGraydonDec 6

@cstross @jered @kottke Exactly this.

As a species, how to apply quantum mechanics comes only once; you must industrialize, another only-once, first. There is more alteration of our circumstances in the past two centuries than in the previous ten millennia.

It changes how you get status, not just who has it, and incumbents respond to that by setting out to kill whoever is trying to reduce their status. (Which is to say; everyone, all of us, for the sin of wanting to live in the future.)

Show threadJered FloydDec 6
@cstross @kottke I was thinking more a grave misunderstanding of Darwinian "survival of the fittest", as if the "M&M duels" guy from the early days of USENET was serious, a sociopath, and now head of Health and Human Services.
Show threadJaime RobertsonDec 6

@cstross @jered @kottke
Isn’t that the opposite of the Quiverfull thing? Have as many children as possible so We outnumber Them.

Anyhow, Those are ‘the good ol’ days’ conservatives are always yearning for.

Show threadCharlie StrossDec 6
@JamesPadraicR @jered @kottke Oh, these are social darwinists, white supremacists, and plain old male chauvanists. God-fearing white women should be taken care of by their owners and treated as valuable breeding stock: non-white babies are welcome to die in Gilead. /s
Show threadJaime RobertsonDec 6

@cstross @jered @kottke Unfortunately there are too many people who actually think that, including some “God-fearing white women”.

An obscure Bowie lyric comes to mind “Gotta, gotta get me out of here.”

Show threadepicdemiologistDec 6
@kottke When my eldest sister was a baby (1940s), an older woman saw my mother playing with her and said, "What a beautiful baby! I hopes you raise her." (i.e., I hope she lives to adulthood). Even then, it was shocking to my mother to hear that. Those times may be coming again.