What hurted people 100 years ago?
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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Influenza and tuberculosis carried away more lives in the past than the current cancer and heart disease.
Medicine historians David Jones, Scott Podolski and Jeremy Green analyzed mortality rates worldwide for the last hundred years and compared which diseases took the most lives in 1900 and now.
The figures are about the vertical axis - the total number of deceased, and the figure near the name of each disease - the number of deaths per 100 thousand people. As can be seen from the diagram, the nature of diseases and their prevalence have changed significantly: some diseases have managed to pass into a number of curable or even disappear, while others have appeared recently.
It should be noted that at the beginning of the last century, physicians were largely concerned with the problems of a low-activity lifestyle, which, as expected, will result in the mass distribution of cars, elevators and other mechanisms that facilitate the physical activity of a person of the future.
One of the articles of that time predicted in particular the emergence of such an ailment as a "car knee", implying under this term probable problems with joints from a long stay behind the wheel in one pose.
The graph also shows that the development of medicine (especially - the invention of antibiotics and the widespread use of basic hygiene rules) in the 20th century virtually nullified the mortality from pneumonia, tuberculosis and gastrointestinal diseases. At the same time, for a number of reasons, cardiovascular diseases have become a major threat to modern earthling, as well as cancer.
Among the significant threats through which humanity with more or less losses have passed in the last hundred years, scientists have noted periodic outbreaks of various infectious diseases, for example, Eastern equine encephalitis in 1938, the so-called Legionnaires' disease in 1977, AIDS in 1981, and tuberculosis, which unexpectedly mutated and became resistant to vaccines in 1993.