Title really, is it just that our diet is better and decent food is much more abundant or is it just general hygiene?
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We have better drugs and medical help for diarrhea. Back when, the body ran it’s course and without help, it killed people. Today you can go to doctor or an ER to get rehydrated and electrolytes.
Diarrhea causes dehydration, easy fix is to just drink more water right? Well(no pun intended) your water source may be what gave you the diarrhea bug to begin with. If you have another water source you may be able to let the bug run it’s course, but drinking from the same contaminated water will just keep reintroducing what’s giving you the Hershey squirts so your body can never really deal with it properly. Today, we treat drinking water for that sort of thing, and have better medicine if you do catch it by drinking out of a pond or something.
A lot of illnesses with high mortality rates that diarrhea is a symptom of are better treated today and are less common.
For example, cholera outbreaks occurred frequently in 19th century Europe due to poor sanitation standards. This disease caused severe diarrhea and can have a mortality rate of up to 50-60% if left untreated. Today, cholera is very rare since the public water supply is much more cleaner and less prone to contamination by disease. If someone does contract cholera, there are much more advanced medical treatment available that make the mortality rate <1% if you seek treatment.
Furthermore, complications caused by diarrhea such as dehydration and loss of nutrients can be more easily treated today as well.
A modern person’s experience of diarrhea is different from a person living in a time or place with poor sanitation. Illness from spoiled food can make life unpleasant for a day or two, but usually once the food (and the bacteria in it) has cleared your system, you get back to normal.
Diseases like cholera and dysentery instead come from water contaminated with sewage. They cause much longer bouts of diarrhea lasting weeks or months, which can induce severe dehydration and death. You may also keep reintroducing the disease into your system if you don’t understand that you’re getting it from the water supply.
It can still be a huge deal. Particularly with the old and the very young. But one interesting historical tidbit for you. The civil war pow camp Andersonville sat on a huge deposit of gypsum which was later discovered to treat diarrhea, which is what killed a huge amount of those prisoners. All that time they were on top of the cure.
Your premise is wrong, over a million children die a year of diarrheal diseases. https://ourworldindata.org/diarrheal-diseases#:~:text=In%202017%2C%20almost%201.6%20million,from%20terrorism%20%E2%80%93%20in%20total%201%2C355%2C000.
First of all, diarrhea is a symptom, not a disease in and of itself. It can be caused by ingesting pathogens in water or food, or it can be caused by a whole litany of illnesses some of which are not related to hygiene. As a symptom, it is dangerous because it can lead to severe dehydration. However, modern medicine has the ability to safely counteract the dehydrating effects of diarrhea with the use of antidiarrheal medications and uncontaminated fluids that are widely available today but were not back when it “killed so many people.”
Clean drinking water, washing of hands, and general hygiene.
Now diarrhoea still kills lots of people globally in the developing world. Many charities spend lots of time, effort, resources and money, spreading information, teaching, and giving supplies like soap for masses of people. **This is still a massive global problem!**
It is only in the mid-1800s thanks to Pasteur and Semmelweis we learned about germs and importance of hygiene.
Edit: and just to add it isn’t like we are that good with this stuff in the developed world either. Whenever there are noro-virus outbreaks, it is because of fecal-oral transmission. To put it simple, people don’t wash their hands after going to the toilet!
It’s really really wet…which means it’s mostly water. Which means your body is *losing* that much water. Dehydration becomes a serious danger.
Through education many people have been taught to purify their water. It was discovered that setting clear water bottles out in full sun kills a lot of bacteria. The invention of Gatorade and other electrolyte drinks helps prevent death by dehydration. They even have a formula where you use that uses table salt, sugar and lemon that saved a bunch of lives a few years back in India I think
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