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Medicine

Because of medical advances, people lived longer than ever before – the general ability to treat and cure disease increased exponentially during the century.

Repairing the human damage: World War I

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Immunisation and antibiotics

Previously fatal diseases were overcome by new discoveries. Immunisation programmes in the West radically cut the mortality rates of such childhood diseases as measles, polio, diphtheria and whooping cough. In 1978, the World Health Organization announced the first disappearance from the face of the earth of a disease – smallpox – the result of a lengthy worldwide immunisation campaign.

In addition, the death sentence of diabetes was eliminated by the discovery of insulin in 1922. And since the 1940s, effective antibiotics saved billions of lives by combating septicaemia, tuberculosis, pneumonia, meningitis, post- operative infections and sexually transmitted diseases. Of course, such advances raised questions about the availability of treatment in the under-developed world. Bacteria also emerged that were resistant to antibiotics.

After the first kidney transplant was carried out in Chicago in 1950, transplants became increasing common and helped lengthen life. Drugs and advances in anaesthesia made major operations – such as open-heart surgery – a practical possibility from the 1940s onwards. And mental illnesses were increasingly understood, with drugs developed to treat them, although prejudice against mentally ill people proved less easy to tackle.

New diseases

On the other hand, new diseases and conditions appeared, some resulting from the sedentary lifestyles of the populations of the West and the effects of pollution. They included asthma, allergies, obesity, declining sperm counts and hormonal changes. Leisure activities – in particular, the use of recreational drugs and sexual experimentation – also led to health problems such as heroin addiction and sexually transmitted diseases.

Aids, first recognised in the early 1980s, claimed more than 22 million lives worldwide by 2000. In Africa, lack of the drugs known to inhibit Aids meant that up to 40% of all deaths among sexually active people were due to the disease.

Other new diseases that emerged towards the end of the century included Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Lassa, Ebola and green monkey fevers. The rise in global travel helped to spread diseases beyond their natural areas of occurrence. This first emerged as a factor in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, which was spread across continents by soldiers returning from fighting in World War I.

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