Eddy Edson
Well-Known Member
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 2
The benefits of ventilation reach far beyond the coronavirus. What if we stop taking colds and flus for granted, too?
www.theatlantic.com
When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city’s drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape.
The 19th and early 20th century saw a number of ambitious public-health efforts like this. The United States eliminated yellow fever and malaria, for example, with a combination of pesticides, wide-scale landscape management, and window screens that kept mosquitoes at bay. One by one, the diseases that people accepted as inevitable facts in life—dysentery, typhoid, typhus, to name a few more—became unacceptable in the developing world. But after all this success, after all we’ve done to prevent the spread of disease through water and insects, we seem to have overlooked something. We overlooked air.
A paean to the vision of public health.
And a bracing prophylaxis against all the contemptible little low-rent Dr Strangeloves going on about how we need to get used to dying from COVID because we got used to people dying from flu (even though they actually don't these days).
The Plan to Stop Every Respiratory Virus at Once
The benefits of ventilation reach far beyond the coronavirus. What if we stop taking colds and flus for granted, too?
www.theatlantic.com
When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city’s drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape.
The 19th and early 20th century saw a number of ambitious public-health efforts like this. The United States eliminated yellow fever and malaria, for example, with a combination of pesticides, wide-scale landscape management, and window screens that kept mosquitoes at bay. One by one, the diseases that people accepted as inevitable facts in life—dysentery, typhoid, typhus, to name a few more—became unacceptable in the developing world. But after all this success, after all we’ve done to prevent the spread of disease through water and insects, we seem to have overlooked something. We overlooked air.
A paean to the vision of public health.
And a bracing prophylaxis against all the contemptible little low-rent Dr Strangeloves going on about how we need to get used to dying from COVID because we got used to people dying from flu (even though they actually don't these days).