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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c diff, a bacteria that is unfortunately spread these days in hospital settings, causes extended bouts of diarrhea that can indeed be deadly if not treated.
The treatment that you need, besides antibiotics to kill the infection, is rehydration. That’s not a big deal if you A) have a clean water supply to drink from, along with a way to eat or drink electrolytes and other nutrients you need, or B) can go to the hospital and get IV fluids to rehydrate rapidly, bypassing your digestive system.
Those are not universally available options. For people too embarrassed or stubborn to go get help, diarrhea can be a serious risk. Where those resources are lacking entirely, diarrhea is still a very deadly risk.
Diarrhea kills through dehydration. In severe cases it can so your intestinal lining to the point where you cannot absorb much water, so you die.
Cholera kills this way. The treatment for Cholera is to put the patient on IV fluid (fluid introduced directly into the blood), and keep them alive this way until their body fights of the cholera. So very few people die of cholera in first-world countries, both because we know how to limit the spread (hygiene, snatiation), and because we know how to treat it.
Severe, long-term dehydration was usually the main issue. Now we can treat the underlying infection more easily, and also give IV fluids to counteract the loss of water.
But it’s still a big issue in many parts of the world where sanitation and access to clean water and medicine is limited.
It’s still an absolutely massive deal. It’s one of the leading causes of death worldwide, especially among children.
Diarrhea kills almost 3,00 children a day. [https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/global/programs/globaldiarrhea508c.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/global/programs/globaldiarrhea508c.pdf)
and over 1.6 million people each year. “This is more than all deaths from all ‘intentional injuries’ combined in the same year: almost 800,000 died from suicide, 405,000 from homicide, 130,000 in conflict, and 26,500 from terrorism – in total 1,355,000.”
It’s one of the leading causes of preventable death.
[https://ourworldindata.org/diarrheal-diseases](https://ourworldindata.org/diarrheal-diseases)
Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up, she was shitting brown water. The more she drank the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew.
George R.R. Martin
2017 1.7 million died from diarrhea. It’s still a huge problem.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/diarrheal-diseases
Diarrhea causes dehydration, and that can kill you. If you drink a lot of water to treat the dehydration, you wash all the salt out of your body, and your brain and heart stop working. Eventually we figured out a precise way to make weak saltwater so it’ll still hydrate you some and will also replenish the salt it washes out of you. Giving someone a bunch of precisely made saltwater to treat diarrhea is called “oral rehydration therapy” and it’s a big part of why people with access to medical treatment rarely die of diarrheal diseases anymore.
Well, it still is a big deal in many parts of the world. Children are specially vulnerable if they have limited to no access to clean water, vaccination programs, etc.
I’ve seen many children admitted to the PICU and even die from complications from shock just for having had diarrhea.
starting this time of the year into sept even october, we hear about salmonella outbreaks associated with lettuce
turns out the major lettuce fields in the Salinas/watsonville areas are a few miles away from major cattle feed lots, normally not a problem but with the heat of the summer and seasonal winds, dust…er powdered cow poop travels farther and settles onto the fields of greens. (difficult to wash off)
the juxtabposition of food and poop has always been an issue for civilization. cavemen would abandon a very nice cave as they filled it with crap, literally as it just got too unhealthy. as we converted to farming, we used our poop to fertilize the fields, (you know that thing about 7 year fallow? well the farmers would collect the ‘night soils’ and dump it on that fallow grounds….until towns turned into cities and the fields were just too far to walk with a bucket of poop. so London turned into a filthy fetid cesspool literally thigh deep and eventually it leached down into the water table.
now we require kitchen workers to glove up because we can’t trust people to wash their fn hands after wiping their ass.
its all about hygiene.
if there’s a crisis that sends thousand of people running for their lives, refugees, first thing that happens without intervention is people poop in the woods, far too close to streams and rivers and disentery, typhoid, other ills starts killing, first elderly and infants then healthy folks. dead bodies laying around make things 10x worse.
We learned to keep poop out of the water supply.
Recently. As in up until the 1920s, clean water wasn’t always a standard much of anywhere.
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