5 ms·

Diseases of civilization usually refers to things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer. I'm not 100% sure but I think the common threads are metabolic

• ekianjo 4y ago
  cancer has nothing to do with civilisation. it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies
  • wutbrodo 4y ago
    > it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies This doesn't falsify the claim at all. Diabetes was first recorded 3500 years ago, and none of the other diseases on the list were literally invented by industrialization. Diseases of civilization refers (essentially) to diseases whose casualty rates dominate in societies of abundance and industrialization, by contrast to the predominance of (eg) infectious diseases in pre-industrial societies. I do agree that it stands slightly apart from the rest of the examples, in that (eg) a contemporary hunter-gatherer still has a fair chance of getting cancer while they have a very low chance of diabetes/obesity. But it's pedantry to claim flatly that it doesn't qualify, especially given plenty of scientific usage[1][2][3] that contradicts the claim. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/#:~:text=Large%20amounts%20of%20scientific%20evidence,disscussed%20further%20in%20this%20paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/#:~:tex.... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00933491 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00933491 [3] https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/323926 https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/323926