Number of words: 147<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the history of medicine, no significant disease had ever been eradicated by a treatment-related program alone. If one plotted the decline in deaths from tuberculosis, for instance, the decline predated the arrival of new antibiotics by several decades. Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements\u2014better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation\u2014had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindled as a result of vaccinations. Cairns wrote, \u201cThe death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases. . . . To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n