Remaking medicine and health

In this morning's news: two children in Dakota County have measles and one of them is very seriously ill.  Why is this news?  Because measles is no longer a common childhood disease that almost every American kid got and some died from.

The news item recalled for me sections of the book Emperor of All Maladies:  A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, specifically the section near the beginning that describes the remaking of health in the United States in the middle third of the twentieth century.  Development of immunizations and of antibiotics changed our experience of illness and expectations of health and thereby remade American childhood, parenting, and much more.

This got me thinking about measles as a dense fact and the sorts of questions we could ask about the disease in this cultural context.  Some parents would deliberately expose all their kids at once, to "get it over with."  What was the effect onschool classrooms of kids being sick?  There is the larger issue of school's requireing students to have been vaccinated against this and other diseases before enrolling and some parents' objections to doing so.  We might also be interested in the insurance industry and its encouragement, or not, of preventative medicine.

Although this is not a development that we'll take up in class, it may be one to keep in the back of our minds.  The notion that Americans are healthy is, I suspect, pretty central to our self-understanding.  We could expand beyond measles to investigate just how true this self perception is.  I'd want to look at infant mortality rates, the crisis of obesity, diabetes, and cancer as well as the positive effects of polio vaccine, penicillin, and the like.  Mukherjee points out that one factor contributing to the incidence of cancer in the USA is how long Americans live.  If one dies from a childhood disease, that person will not get cancer later.