You're right that there is far more to it than Alzheimers. Still, Quadmaster has half a point. It's probably not consumption (tuberculosis), or hookworm. It's much less likely than it was to be black lung. Even smoking is decreasing, though it will take another generation for that to show up in the old people.
So we're making progress. But we don't see it, because that becomes the new normal, and we see all these remaining things that cause problems for old people.
> Still, Quadmaster has half a point. It's probably not consumption (tuberculosis), or hookworm. It's much less likely than it was to be black lung.
But that's not because we got better at treating hookworm or black lung. The big ideas there are "wear shoes" and "don't work as a miner". You don't have to treat a problem you never have.
(Wikipedia: "There is no cure or discovered treatments for pneumoconiosis.")
TB killed 1.25 million in 2023 and the WHO considers it the world’s leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, outpaced only temporarily by COVID.
It's safe to say that they were speaking from the perspective of developed countries where the mortality rate of TB is roughly 0.2 per 100,000. Which makes the case that we know how to make it statistically insignificant, but the infrastructure to apply that knowledge is not perfectly distributed.
> we know how to make it statistically insignificant
TB is weird. We do indeed know how to actively manage it (e.g. screen people regularly and treat detected cases), but countries like the US don’t do that. Nonetheless TB does not cause much disease in the US.
Every time I’ve tried to figure out why this is, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that no one really knows. Maybe it’s the general lack of malnutrition?
TB is a bacteria and people in developed countries generally get treated when they have symptoms of infections. But underdeveloped countries don't have the resources for that, so infections are just "powered through". In addition, a lot of it comes down to resources we take for granted, like sanitation, running water, soap, population density, etc. We have cleaner air, cleaner water, and are more conscious about spreading diseases because we are wealthier.
> they were speaking from the perspective of developed countries
But that's just creatively selecting the data that supports the point. You can do that with everything else. We solved a lot of things "in the lab" or "in mice".
Did you know that we conquered Alzheimer's? It's safe to say I mean in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Somalia or Chad with under 100 cases per 100k people.
So we're making progress. But we don't see it, because that becomes the new normal, and we see all these remaining things that cause problems for old people.