this is also why vaccines are so important. 'well what did people do before then' I have heard a lot of that sort of sentiment from anti-vax folks and like... martha, they DIED. Babies DIED. In the thousands. Go to an old cemetery and look at the graves. Look at the ages. I have seen so many graves for children under the age of 3. For infants that hadn't been alive long enough to have a name.
Measles, mumps, rubella, and the seasonal--SEASONAL--plagues of water-bourne diseases (polio, cholera, dysentery) that diarrhea you to death killed thousands of children every year. Every fucking year. Vaccines can prevent the first three, can prevent chicken pox/shingles, can prevent, these days, even hepatitis. But there is no vaccine for dysentery, for typhoid, for a surprising number of the Old Plagues, because we eliminated them using a completely different method: Public Health and Sanitation, which kills them at the source.
In 1949, the government actually commissioned Warner Bros' animation department to put together a video explaining to people the importance of paying tax to fund the public health system--and it still explains the basics pretty well:
On the other side of the pond, there's a reason London celebrated Joseph Bazalgette's design and building of the first sanitary sewer. He saved lives.
Sometimes I think Present-Day America's utter squeamishness; and inability to talk seriously about things that have to do with bodies and bodily functions, is actually what is costing us critical health infrastructure. We already cannot get public toilets off the ground in this country bc the minute you mention 'toilet' people lose their fucking minds, and are so uncomfortable with the fact that Everyone Poops that they can't stop babbling jokes, and nothing can get done. But public toilets are a public health issue. People need to piss and shit, and if you don't give them enough places to do it in a safe sanitary way, they will still need to do it and will go and do it in an alley or on a building or what-have-you, and that's a public health issue!
Public Health is so often derided, indeed it's even dismantled because people don't like to acknowledge its worth or just plain never learn about it as anything but a joke. Oregon doesn't have fluoridated water anymore, did you know that? They literally rolled back a public health measure for not goddamn reason other than an acute breakout of hysterical ignorance. If you're out and about in just about any city in this country—and even in Canada and the UK as well—you're still on a Bladder Leash, because there are just about ZERO bathrooms accessible to the public. That's a public health issue!
If you live in NYC, you get the importance of sanitation workers shoved up your nose every time you go outside. They used to have metal trashcans, but that was rolled back and now the bags just pile up on the sidewalks. That's a public health issue!
My small town has inadequate waste collection, meaning trash that doesn't fit the exacting rules and tiny single trash bin piles up in our home. There is no government sanitation, it's outsourced to a private company based out of state. That's ludicrous, and I imagine we aren't the only small town with this public health issue!
Children and adults aren't required to be vaccinated before going to school and work, where they could spread or start epidemics. Children and adults aren't required to mask in public places anymore, even when showing signs of communicable disease. Children an adults aren't required to stay home if showing signs of illness. That's also a fucking public health issue!
Eating out, swimming in public pools, going to water parks, concerts, conventions, parties, theme/amusement parks, theatres, rallies, and parades are all possible to do safely because of public health departments and public health measures. The fact that so many have been dismantled, made voluntary rather than mandated, and generally gutted is genuinely worrying. We have the technology to live without diseases, and to eradicate new ones within months, and the Western world just doesn't, because we fed so many generations the lie that we aren't part of a larger community and have no responsibility to other people.
That's so, so incredibly wrong, and Miss Rona pointed that out sharply.
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