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What about cigarettes, lead pipes, lead paint? There's quite a few chemicals/toxins that were in use for thousands of years before any did anything about them.
by RobertRoberts 8y ago
What about cigarettes, lead pipes, lead paint? There's quite a few chemicals/toxins that were in use for thousands of years before any did anything about them. Even something as simple as hygiene is new to doctors as of the 18th century.
- mikeash 8y agoYou can’t look before the modern era, as the tools and techniques for discovering this sort of long-term damage didn’t exist. Are there any examples of things that were in pervasive use around, say, 1970 but didn’t get recognized as dangerous until recently? I think there are examples in nutrition, but I don’t know about environmental toxins.
- RobertRoberts 8y agoEvery era is the modern era, until it isn't anymore. Are you claiming that people could spend decades counting the average movement of the moon around the earth, accurate to the fraction of a second, thousands of years ago, but couldn't understand long term health effects until just recently?
- mikeash 8y agoI'm pretty sure you know that I was referring to the period of time from a couple hundred years ago until now, 2018, when I said "the modern era." Let's not delve into semantic fuckery. And yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Figuring out the motion of the moon can be done by a single person using nothing but dedicated observation and arithmetic. Figuring out the public health effects of chronic low-level exposure to toxins requires statistical techniques and data-gathering infrastructure that didn't exist until at least the 18th century, and wasn't commonly applied until the 20th century. The concept of long-term health effects due to exposure to stuff has been around forever, but the ability to conclusively prove it is a lot more recent.