Do you think we're any healthier today than we were in the 60s and 70s?

According to this we are.

No. It’s worse.

Well, cOcAiNe use has decreased, I presume.

That’s life span @lucillelucillelucille. It doesn’t mean we’re healthier overall in our lives. It just means we have the technology to prolong our lives. Rick’s dad lived to be 96, but only because of advances in the medical field.
I’m referring to health throughout our lives. The biggest contribution factor to our health were vaccines and antibiotics. That’s why I used the 60s as a comparison to present day.

Put another way, are 10 year kids healthier today than we were in the 60s? Has all this protection, like wrapping straws, no more cloth drying towels in public bathrooms, replacing water fountians with plastic botttles…has any of that done a bit of real good?

@Dutchess_III -Healthier overall?
Diseases etc. have always been there,ready to take someone out, no matter what decade.New things crop up too.
As for anti-bacterial,soaps,wrapped straws,etc, I’d rather have a wrapped straw than an unwrapped one that’s been handled by someone that doesn’t bother to wash their potty hands.

Exactly my point. Has that mindset done us any actual concrete good? Are children healthier than they have been in the past? I really don’t think they are. They get all the same stuff I got and my kids got and their kids get. We just spend extra money for stuff to be thrown in the landfill, or in the ocean, because people let their imaginations run wild.

@Dutchess_III-In some ways, it probably has.
I’d have to look up deaths within certain age groups within certain decades but because people are living longer today than in years past, less kids are dying… sooooo do these precautions help prevent the spread of disease? Maybe.
On the other side of the coin, some vaccines have been blamed for causing health issues.
I still want my straw wrapped but I can use regular soap to wash my hands.

There are some significant improvements in public health since 1960. #1 is the huge decrease in smoking. Huge advancements in transplants. Bug improvements in overall cardio healthcare. And polio was a huge problem before the mass vaccinations in the early 60s.

On the downside, overall obesity has seen a big increase in diabetes.

Good points…but they don’t adress whether these additional precautions we take have made our kids today healthier?

BTW that picture of the kids drinking from the water fountian is me and my little sister, probably about 1965.

@Dutchess_lll How would you measure that?

Well I don’t know. I just know my kids progressed through virtually every Illness I ever had, and their kids are now progressing through the same illnesses.
On FB young parents tell when their kids are sick.
I feel like it’s impossible to sucessfully evade the common viruses and bacteria. It’ll get them sooner or later.

Parents are strapping their kids down. Some freak out over a little dirt. Don’t drink out of the hose! Don’t drink out of the water fountain! Don’t touch this! Don’t touch that!

Probably less healthy. It’s unbelievable to me that folks think to lose weight you need to go spend money at a diet center. To exercise you must go somewhere and join a gym for money. You need to pay a nutritionist or dietitian to tell you what to eat. Get fashion consultants and interior designers to do your wardrobe and home. Culture right now is about how much money one can spend on “necessities” that aren’t. I laugh at someone every day about one of these kinds of misguided life behaviors. Life is really good when it is clean and simple.

Right? Like we are too dumb to figure it out ourselves.

In my opinion, the term “healthier” is vague. In order to compare then to now, you need to specify some type of marker to measure by. To say “we are healthier” doesn’t define what you mean by healthy.

To compare accurately, you’d need to say something like “less incidence of death by stroke and heart attack” or something like that. Something where you can compare actual data.

To just say “healthier” would depend on someone’s definition of healthy (as evidenced above where different people have different thoughts about healthy but can’t really debate it accurately).

I’m not talking about stroke and heart attacks.
I am talking about communicable diseases, like the flue and colds, strep throat, pink eye. Do we see fewer instances of those diseases in kids today than we did in the 60s? I mean, that’s what we’re trying to prevent with all the hand washing and bottled water business. Is it working?

“The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans” – - – www dot history dot com

Yes. And polio. And small pox. And the bubonic plague. Which is why I narrowed the parameters to compare the 60s to present day.

@Dutchess_lll ”... strep throat, pink eye. One thing that demonstrates better health care now is that strep gets treated early enough that it doesn’t develop into scarlet fever. Kids with ear infections are treated early enough that they don;t go deaf for life. Kids with pink eye don’t have severe vision problems from having untreated infections.

And child safety/child proofing is way beyond what it was in the 60s and 70s. I never saw a car seat for infants or toddlers before 1980.

Yes. Strep is treated early enough so that it doesn’t turn into scarlet fever, but again, that is thanks to the discovery of antibiotics in the 50s. Which is why I used the 60s as a comparison point. The point is, the kids today still get strep throat as much as they ever did.

Lack of seat belts, car seats and riding in the back of trucks were a factor in childhood deaths, and adult deaths, too, but had nothing to do with their overall, daily health.

@Dutchess_III: What illnesses would you like to use as parameters? Or would you like to use the infant mortality rate?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_20/sr20_020acc.pdf

“From 1960 to 1988 the infant mortality rate for the United States declined by 60 percent from 26.0 to 10.0 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. The infant mortality rate declined slowly from 1960 to 1964, rapidly from 1965 to 1981, and then moderately from 1981 to 1988.”

I’m going to reask the question. This isn’t about dying or long lives. It’s about communicable illnesses.