Disease 1900 to 2000

The graph shows the U.S. death rate for infectious diseases between 1900 and 1996. The line starts all the way at the top. In 1900, 800 of every 100,000 Americans died from infectious diseases. The top killers were pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea. But the line quickly begins falling. By 1920, fewer than 400 of every 100,000 Americans died from infectious diseases. By 1940, it was less than 200. By 1960, it’s below 100. When’s the last time you heard of an American dying from diarrhea?  “For all the millennia before this in human history,” Coburn says, “it was all about tuberculosis and diarrheal diseases and all the other infectious disease. The idea that anybody lived long enough to be confronting chronic diseases is a new invention. Average life expectancy was 45 years old at the turn of the century. You didn’t have 85-year-olds with chronic diseases.”

With chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease you don’t get better, or at least not quickly. They don’t require cures so much as management. Their existence is often proof of medicine’s successes. Three decades ago, cancer typically killed you. Today, many cancers can be fought off for years or even indefinitely. The same is true for AIDS, and acute heart failure and so much else. This, to Coburn, is the core truth, and core problem, of today’s medical system: Its successes have changed the problems, but the health-care system hasn’t kept up.

Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of the health policy and management school at Emory University, estimates that 95 percent of spending in Medicare goes to patients with one or more chronic conditions — with enrollees suffering five or more chronic conditions accounting for 78 percent of its spending.

personal observations: When I go to the lab for blood work it is 95% elderly patients in the waiting room. I think I read that 75% of the cost of a person's health care will occur in the last 6 months of life.

Natures Strategy

It is well known that for every plant and animal nature has built-in procreation in greater numbers than can be sustained by their environment. This strategy is meant to overcome the fact that most offspring will never reach maturity. Plants generate thousands of seeds or millions of spores and many of the offspring of animals do not survive the hazards of life.
Human animals have reached a world population of about 6.5 billion and it is projected to be 9 billion by 2050. Most of the increase will be in the third world, which can least afford it. There is real doubt whether the world environment can support these numbers. The pessimistic view is that environmental damage combined with war, famine and disease will result in the premature death of hundreds of millions people. The USA and western Europe may expect millions will seek refuge illegally on our soil. We better be prepared.

War of the Worlds, 1898-2007

Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds opens with a microscope view of a drop of water. We see what appears to be DNA and as the camera pulls back we see bacteria, etc. At the end of the movie the voice-over quotes the following from the original 1898 novel...(the Martians)slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth. For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things-- taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle...By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.


I recall reading that Smallpox alone killed 100 million people between 1900 and 2000.  The Plague in Medievel times killed 1/3 of the population of Europe.


Saw this movie at the theater. Great special effects. The sound the Martian machines make is awesome. That sound was described in the original book (ca 1900). The side plot about the dysfunctional family did not add anything. I was curious to see how Spielberg would do the film. It appears he borrowed from the original book as well as the 1953 film. Gene Barry and his female co-star from he 1953 film make a cameo appearance in this film.
You can read the original book on-line at the link below.
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells: A searchable online version at The Literature Network