ur_gothmom

Public health are currently warning people in my city about measles exposures. We'll get back to this.

There's a popular tumblr post that circulates regularly by someone who stopped their years-long use of dandruff shampoo, only to have their dandruff come back, with an important addition from tumblr user thomranierskies, a transplant patient, which I will reproduce in full:


This is something that happens at a personal level and at a population level. People stop using their dandruff shampoo or stop taking their meds because they think the problem is gone. People stop following public health precautions because "nobody gets [problem] anymore" or even because they forget what problem the precautions are being used to prevent. Scurvy was cured in the 18th century and then the institutional knowledge was lost and only rediscovered in the early 20th.

If you ask the average person if they're concerned about scurvy, they'd probably say, "Nobody gets scurvy anymore." This is mostly true, but maybe not for the reasons they think. It's certainly not because scurvy has been "eradicated" (I'd pedantically say it's impossible to eradicate a nutrient deficiency) but because most people in the west in the 21st century have mostly decent access to fresh foods and lots of packaged foods fortified with vitamin C and any other number of ways to get that vitamin into their bodies. If you stop getting vitamin C, you 100% will get scurvy. A (very smart) friend of mine has in fact had scurvy twice* and the first time was lucky enough to be seen by a doctor who wasn't from a western country where "nobody gets scurvy anymore" who immediately recognized the symptoms from having seen it in their home country.

Scurvy has the advantages of being very treatable and not contagious. But I think a similar thought process (with much more dangerous outcome) is happening when people say "Nobody gets measles anymore" or "Nobody gets polio anymore" or, arguably even more concerning, "Nobody gets rabies anymore" and decides to stop vaccinating their children and/or pets.

We vaccinate the majority of the population against measles and polio, etc. We vaccinate the majority of our pets against rabies. Which means cases as a whole go down because the vaccines are working. Unfortunately, people are stupid. They no longer see the consequences of not vaccinating, and think "Nobody gets measles anymore, why should I subject my kid to this?" They stop vaccinating. Now we have measles cases again and public health has to frantically try to find everyone who was e.g. in an airport or on a subway on a particular day.

So what, we're supposed to just keep getting vaccinated forever? Well, maybe, and if so it's (partly) our stupid fault.

We actually know what happens when humanity successfully eradicates (not just massively decreases number of cases) a disease. We did it once, with smallpox. Most people reading this post probably have not been vaccinated against smallpox (shoutout to the Boomers, oldest Gen X, and gay men immunized during the mpox outbreak if you're here) because we for-real got rid of smallpox, all of it, and then we didn't need to routinely give that vaccine to everyone anymore. In theory we could maybe do this again one day for measles and polio (since cursory googling tells me these diseases exist only in humans) but we're not there yet, and as numbers of unvaccinated people go up we get farther and farther from that goal. We will probably never get there for rabies or other diseases with reservoirs in wild animal populations, which unfortunately includes covid now.

This post is long enough without going into, say, hygiene and all the diseases we're preventing with regular bathing, or all the "disruptor" types who want to "shake things up" and have spent literally 0 time thinking about why we do things the way we do them (safety regulations are written in blood, etc. etc.) but those connections very much are there to be made. When it comes to public health, this universal human tendency towards stupidity needs to be planned for and worked around.


*It turns out when you get very depressed and eat only tea and toast it takes a surprisingly short time to develop the first symptoms of scurvy. If you're in the throes of a depressive episode maybe take a multivitamin or something.

I've been reading for as long as I can remember. Literally; I learned to read by the time I was about three, so I don't actually remember the process of learning, but my parents tell me I essentially taught myself. I don't remember much about how reading was taught in my elementary school, either, since I was already zipping through Nancy Drews while everyone else was learning the basics, except for my grade three teacher's USSR time (that's "uninterrupted, sustained silent reading") one morning a week. But I do have vague memories of being told to sound it out when I used to come to words that were long and unfamiliar.

Which is why the Sold a Story podcast series has been SO mind-blowing. Little did I know, over the past several decades, a theory of how people read that is completely wrong was adopted by tons of schools all over the English-speaking world. It was disproved by Harvard neuroscientists in the 1990s, but it's still being used in some schools to this day. Please go listen to it; it's one of the most shocking things I've heard this year.

It seems so obvious, so self-evident, that in order to read you have to... actually... read. You have to look at the letters and sound out the words. How could it be that thousands of teachers were convinced the opposite is true? The podcast doesn't go into the implications, but that's what I find really chilling: this has been out there in the wild for decades, meaning that a significant proportion of kids, teens, and adults have grown up functionally illiterate. What does this mean for our society? How do we collectively undo the harm from this? Is that even possible?