Good News Update by Kip Hansen
Science is a wonderful thing. As time moves on, in a single direction, Science, as an endeavor, discovers new things and improves our lives. Sometimes though, things get better, and we don’t know why.
That’s the news from Gina Kolata, Health & Science reporter at the NY Times, in an article dated JULY 8, 2016, titled A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline. [ here ].
The Good News:
“…Hip fractures, [incidence]… rates have been dropping by 15 to 20 percent a decade over the past 30 years.”
“The exemplar for declining rates is heart disease. Its death rate has been falling for so long — more than half a century — that it’s no longer news. The news now is that the rate of decline seems to have slowed recently.”,
“Dementia rates, too, have been plunging. … a 20 percent decline in dementia incidence per decade, starting in 1977.”
“Until the late 1930s, stomach cancer was the No. 1 cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Now just 1.8 percent of American cancer deaths are the result of it.”
“Rates of disease after disease are dropping. Even the rate of ‘all-cause mortality,’ which lumps together chronic diseases, is falling. And every one of those diseases at issue is linked to aging.” [which is increasing as the baby Boomers age].
The cause of this news? In each case, the definitive answer is:
“Dr. Steven R. Cummings of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute and the University of California at San Francisco. When asked [regarding hip fractures] what else was at play, he laughed and said, “I don’t know.”
That answer, a basic “we don’t really know”, is the same for each of the declining diseases – medical advances just don’t fully explain the declines.
Kolata’s coverage is a breath of fresh air in science reporting, where we are more usually subjected to yet-another alarming report of impending personal disaster . [Cue music: “It Ain’t Necessarily So”] caused by vague “chemicals and toxins” [sic] in our environment.
Sometimes [Cue music] we just “got to admit it’s getting better”.
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ristvan
July 10, 2016 at 2:31 pm wrote:
“…IMO google search has changed the world. Books, patents, images, technical papers all a few clicks away for free. What woild have taken days or have been impossible now takes minutes…”
Strange. I remember search engines that supported boolean searches, where you could actually target a search minutely and find JUST what you were seeking. Google gives you a list, often entirely irrelevant. Searching for anything using normal phrase construction is next to impossible.
There are still search engines that support boolean searches, but they’ve been deprived of substance by Google’s superior marketing might.
As for the “free” part, I’ve stopped counting the number of my searches that ended in demands for an extravagant payment for a small snippet of information. And let’s not forget the web cleaners, or have you never encountered evidence of their work, busily and thoroughly removing all traces of once well-publicized reports from the WEB?
There once was a thing called the usenet, with some unmoderated forums that were meant to keep a permanent archive of all posts. Some of that material survives, but Facebook has killed that source of documentation too, trivializing all discussion into a running stream that can’t be searched, after “archiving” all of the foregoing group discussions so thoroughly that even those who posted to them can’t retrieve their own posts anymore.
Reply to otropogo ==> eGads, you must be as old as me! coding vi for file and text manipulation and transmogrification…..regular expression searches across huge folders of files on remote servers, Bulletin Boards, retrieving email with scripts over telephone lines…..