disease

[Guest guest]

> Yeah, this is true too, but this chronic, low level of

> misery which becomes more and more debilitating wasn't

> nearly so common.

Its an interesting and depressing question. Heres some fun facts:

Syphilis is agreed to have arrived in Europe circa 1500, probably from

Africa or the Americas, having evolved there from the more ancient and

less severe endemic treponemoses. It spread around Europe rapidly.

MS seems to have probably been altogether absent before circa 1830.

But, aside from the general doubt one must have about trying to prove

a negative from the limited set of preserved historical sources,

theres the additional worry over the medical naivete of the people who

were around. Symptoms are mere phenomena, but views about their

etiology could influece what was recorded and arrived for our eyes.

Further there is a specific uncertainty here: whether MS could be

adequately distinguished from syphilis by symptoms alone.

The hx of " neurasthenia " and vague sickness syndromes is very hard to

investigate. I have some interesting refs tho if anyone is interested.

It does appear likely that CFS has waxed remarkably since the 60s, but

I havent worked on that question it detail, and definitional

uncertainty vexes the question.

Marie Kroun has a hx of borreliosis, I havent worked thru that in a while.

Crohns went from zero to sixty as it were (or rather, 2 to 60) in the

northern US between 1940 and 1970. Just as it leveled off here it was

sykrocketing from the ground in Japan, and elsewhere.

Autism, in my hastily-formed opinion, appears to be blasting off into

space at this very moment... could be borrelia.

These things tell me theres no point being shocked by the sudden

advent of a certain disease. Every disease was new once. I dont see

any reason to necessarily say, oh, all this borreliosis all of a

sudden must have an unnatural origin. Even if you assume borreliosis

to be a zoonosis (which I dont), it could evolve due to pressures

found in its productive hosts, eg white-footed mouse, in such a way

that coincidentally renders it a much greater hazard than it was before.

But its not that simple. The new-ish idiopathic diseases are many and

it appears very unlikely that they are all caused by one organism -

there is endless evidence suggesting the importance of a variety of

bacteria. Currently I consider the hygeine hypothesis the most

interesting paradigm for fitting this all together, but I dont know

tons about it. Its also possible that half the illness out there is

secondary to some unnatural decline in health allowing increased

victimization by weaker pathogens, while another half is the result of

a new freak-nasty organism whose arrival is comparable to that of

Treponema pallidum pallidum.