3 ms·
That may be so, but they had antisepsis, vaccination and the germ theory of disease in the 1920s and 1930s ... and it still didn't save them from losing as many
by cstross 14y ago
That may be so, but they had antisepsis, vaccination and the germ theory of disease in the 1920s and 1930s ... and it still didn't save them from losing as many people to fulminating bacterial infections as we lose to cancer today.
- maxerickson 14y agoI'm not eager to be without antibiotics or anything. I'm glad (at least some) people are taking the problem seriously. I guess I just think about it from the angle that the public health system has to run around drumming up popular support to get anything new done, even though all the boring old stuff they do has such a huge impact.
- cstross 14y agoHere's a thought: out-sourcing hospital cleaning services to the lowest bidder is a really bad idea. Because the other term for "hospital cleaning services" is "infection control". Similarly, elderly patients frequently end up suffering from malnutrition in hospitals because of poor food and/or not enough staff to feed people with difficulty eating. And malnutrition leads to immunological depression. Again: shaving margins on this stuff costs lives. New drugs actually come some way down the checklist of things we need to be doing to contain infectious diseases.