The article reminds us, "In 1850, four in 10 English babies died before their first birthday." And that's an important point. Today in the developed world it seems almost unimaginable to die in childhood. (The leading cause of death in childhood in most developed countries is "accidents," especially car crashes, and they are steadily declining in rate.)
The headline is a huge overstatement. This idea that modern life makes people sick is one of the most common misconceptions on Hacker News, and I have to keep coming back over and over and over to point to facts on the issue. In point of fact, we are healthier than ever, and living longer than ever. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[1] Trends already in place in incremental improvements in disease prevention and treatment and improvement in medical practice and accessibility of health care make demographers confident in predicting that increases in healthy human lifespan will continue. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[2] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Read this to be up to date with how healthy we are recently. Vaupel's striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[3]
I suppose it could make me ill to see so many poorly evidenced statements about human health on Hacker News, but I'm still healthy and cheerful because I remind myself that few participants here have the training and background to evaluate medical claims, and those who do are able to back up what the trends really are. To me, it is alarming that rates of obesity are climbing so steadily recently in so many countries of the world,[4] and I think it's fair to say that that trend could eventually slow or even reverse the broader general trend to healthier, longer human life, but it hasn't done so yet. Obesity of the kind found in most parts of the world is a much more tractable problem than the problems that used to weaken and sicken and kill us, and I've already figured out strategies for avoiding obesity, even in middle age and even in the environment of lavish food availability I enjoy here in the United States. I build regular exercise into my lifestyle by walking rather than driving to many of my daily errands (I live in an outer-ring suburb with a city walking trail system, but I used to do the same in the inner city neighborhoods I've lived in at various times).
Summing up, antibiotics are not making us generally ill. They are killing a lot of bacteria, and most alarmingly adding selective pressure to the environment of bacteria to select descendant bacteria resistant to current antibiotics. But we are healthier than before. We can continue to become healthier than before while continuing to use antibiotics in human medicine for sick people who need them.[5]
> Summing up, antibiotics are not making us generally ill.
Sure, as a people. But antibiotics are crude instruments, and we have just started funding research into understanding the human microbiome.
It seems like you wasted your time talking about lowering mortality rates and using all those citations when the article sets itself up on that concession.
Most of this article discusses the adverse affects that antibiotics may have on microbes that inhabit our bodies. What is your response to that?
Let me remind you that your anecdote about exercising and living healthy as your way of beating obesity, is just that, an anecdote.
This idea that modern life makes people sick is one of the most common misconceptions on Hacker News, and I have to keep coming back over and over and over to point to facts on the issue.
Not the modern life per se, but some aspects of it - definitely. Not the progress, achieved in surgery - but the widespread sedentary lifestyle and lack of exercise. Not the achievements in agriculture - but the prevalence, cheapness and widespread availability of highly processed foods. Not the invention of antibiotics - but, again, the relative cheapness and availability of substances like alcohol, cigarettes and other abusable substances ...
While, as you point out, the benefits of modern life outweigh the disadvantages, that does not mean that we can just ignore those disadvantages.
While, as you point out, the benefits of modern life outweigh the disadvantages, that does not mean that we can just ignore those disadvantages.
Precisely, and I'm glad you also picked up on what I considered to be the obvious point of the article. The commenter above (despite so magnanimously giving his valuable time over and over and over to educate the rest of us) appears to have completely missed this. As the article author himself clearly states, antibiotics have been a huge net positive for humanity, but this doesn't mean that they don't also have downsides.
It is these downsides that the articles addresses; antibiotics are posited to play a role in the dramatically increasing incidences of immune system dysfunction that are now observed in westernized societies.
Overuse of antibiotics not only leads to decreases in their efficacy, but can also destroy diversity in our microbiomes, damaging our immune systems, making us more vulnerable to pathogens and possibly also leading to developmental problems.
Reducing overuse of antibiotics, especially in young children, should become a central priority for health systems, perhaps complemented with probiotics and similar measures.
>> ...it seems almost unimaginable to die in childhood.
According to the CDC, "Infant mortality is an important indicator of the health of a nation" and the US has been lagging compared to other developed nations for some time [1]. At a rate of ~7 deaths per 1,000 births, with ~4 million births per year [2] - that's 28,000 dead babies per year in recent times.
(I realize that childhood death is different from death at child birth, my point is that it's certainly not unimaginable. Also, the number of childhood deaths per year due to natural illness seems quite high - [3].)
You're right that on average, we're living longer, but living longer and living disease free are two completely different things.
>> Summing up, antibiotics are not making us generally ill.
The main point of the article is that the overuse of antibiotics is making us ill because we have destroyed good bacteria along with the bad. Have you shown anything to disprove that? They described the science they are doing to explore this and linked to studies that support their theory. All of your links talk about mortality and one for obesity.
For comparison, in 1935, the infant mortality rate was 55.7 per 1000 live births (compared to 6 per thousand today). Averaging a decline of 3.1% per year.
The headline is a huge overstatement. This idea that modern life makes people sick is one of the most common misconceptions on Hacker News, and I have to keep coming back over and over and over to point to facts on the issue. In point of fact, we are healthier than ever, and living longer than ever. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[1] Trends already in place in incremental improvements in disease prevention and treatment and improvement in medical practice and accessibility of health care make demographers confident in predicting that increases in healthy human lifespan will continue. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[2] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Read this to be up to date with how healthy we are recently. Vaupel's striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[3]
I suppose it could make me ill to see so many poorly evidenced statements about human health on Hacker News, but I'm still healthy and cheerful because I remind myself that few participants here have the training and background to evaluate medical claims, and those who do are able to back up what the trends really are. To me, it is alarming that rates of obesity are climbing so steadily recently in so many countries of the world,[4] and I think it's fair to say that that trend could eventually slow or even reverse the broader general trend to healthier, longer human life, but it hasn't done so yet. Obesity of the kind found in most parts of the world is a much more tractable problem than the problems that used to weaken and sicken and kill us, and I've already figured out strategies for avoiding obesity, even in middle age and even in the environment of lavish food availability I enjoy here in the United States. I build regular exercise into my lifestyle by walking rather than driving to many of my daily errands (I live in an outer-ring suburb with a city walking trail system, but I used to do the same in the inner city neighborhoods I've lived in at various times).
Summing up, antibiotics are not making us generally ill. They are killing a lot of bacteria, and most alarmingly adding selective pressure to the environment of bacteria to select descendant bacteria resistant to current antibiotics. But we are healthier than before. We can continue to become healthier than before while continuing to use antibiotics in human medicine for sick people who need them.[5]
[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
[2] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...
[3] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
[4] http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27586365
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599040#up_6599795