The Plague Cycle

by Charles Kenny

  45. The Council of the City of New York, Hearing on the Fiscal Year 2014 Executive Budget for the Department of Sanitation, May 30, 2013. Retrieved from https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2013/06/fy2014-deptofsanitation.pdf.

  46. New York City, New York City’s Wastewater Treatment System. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rafik_Karaman/post/How_does_government_control_WWTP_effluent/attachment/59d6340879197b8077991b44/AS%3A377579619012609%401467033404974/download/WWTP+NY+USA.pdf.

  47. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2015, “National Industry-Specific Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, NAICS 325600—Soap, Cleaning Compound, and Toilet Preparation Manufacturing.” Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/oes/2016/may/naics4_325600.html.

  48. Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army (New York: Crown Publishers, 2009), p. 272.

  49. Ibid., p. 273.

  50. M. M. Manring et al., “Treatment of War Wounds: A Historical Review,” Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research 467, no. 8 (2009): 2168–2191.

  51. As late as 1900, four out of ten deaths in the United States were the result of eleven major infectious diseases, chief among them tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria, and typhoid fever. By 1973, only 6 percent of deaths in the US were due to those same causes. But typhoid deaths had fallen from over three per ten thousand people per year in 1900 to negligible levels before the antibiotic chloramphenicol was introduced to fight it in 1948. Tuberculosis was responsible for about two deaths a year for each ten thousand people in the US in 1900. By the time the drug isoniazid was used against tuberculosis in the 1950s, mortality from the disease had fallen by more than three-quarters. Pneumonia mortality rates were a third of their level at the turn of the century by the time that the antibacterial sulfonamide was introduced as a treatment. See John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay, “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly: Health and Society (1977): 405–428, and Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 257. That’s not to say that vaccines haven’t been hugely important to US and European health—between 1924 and 2013, the best estimate is that vaccinations in the US have prevented 103 million cases of polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria, and pertussis combined. See van Willem G. Panhuis et al., “Contagious Diseases in the United States from 1888 to the Present,” New England Journal of Medicine 369, no. 22 (2023): 2152.

  52. Hans-Joachim Voth, “Living Standards and the Urban Environment,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain 1: 1700–1860 (2004).

  53. Suchit Arora, “Health, Human Productivity and Long-Term Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History 61, no. 3 (2001): 699–749.

  54. Edward Anthony Wrigley, Poverty, Progress, and Population (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  55. Marcella Alsan and Claudia Goldin, Watersheds in Infant Mortality: The Role of Effective Water and Sewerage Infrastructure, 1880 to 1915, no. w21263, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2015.

  56. As well as other public infrastructure: public transport played a role in extending health gains by reducing housing density. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p.165. Note, however, some evidence of a limited impact of sewage treatment and bacteriological standards for milk in the United States 1900–1940 presented by Anderson et al. These authors suggest better domestic living conditions and nutrition were more significant causes of health improvements (Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Daniel Rees, Public Health Efforts and the Decline in Urban Mortality, IZA Discussion Paper No. 1773, 2018).

  57. Clark, A Farewell to Alms, pp. 195 and 283.

  58. Myron Echenberg, “Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894–1901,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 429–449.

  59. Blaine Harden, “Dr. Matthew’s Passion,” New York Times, February 18, 2001, p. 1.

  Chapter Seven: Salvation by Needle

  1. Philip C. Grammaticos and Aristidis Diamantis, “Useful Known and Unknown Views of the Father of Modern Medicine, Hippocrates and His Teacher Democritus,” Hellenic Journal of Nuclear Medicine 11, no. 1 (2008): 2–4.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Procopius, History of the Wars, Books I and II. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16764/16764-h/16764-h.htm.

  4. Reprinted in John Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348–1350: A Brief History with Documents (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 73.

  5. Quoted in Aberth The Black Death, p. 65.

  6. Quoted in Mark Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8, no. 9 (2002): 973.

  7. Angela Ki Che Leung, “Organized Medicine in Ming-Qing China: State and Private Medical Institutions in the Lower Yangzi Region,” Late Imperial China 8, no. 1 (1987): 134–166.

  8. Descartes, Discourse on the Method. Retrieved from the Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm.

  9. Monica Rimmer, “How Smallpox Claimed Its Final Victim,” BBC News, August 10, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091.

  10. Ana T. Duggan, Maria F. Perdomo, Dario Piombino-Mascali, Stephanie Marciniak, Debi Poinar, Matthew V. Emery, Jan P. Buchmann et al., “17th Century Variola Virus Reveals the Recent History of Smallpox,” Current Biology 26, no. 24 (2016): 3407–3412.

  11. Donald R. Hopkins, The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  12. Arthur Boylston, “The Origins of Inoculation,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 105, no. 7 (2012): 309–313.

  13. Quoted by Jeanette Farrell, Invisible Enemies: Stories of Infectious Disease (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 17.

  14. Paul A. David, S. Ryan Johansson, and Andrea Pozzi, The Demography of an Early Mortality Transition: Life Expectancy, Survival and Mortality Rates for Britain’s Royals, 1500–1799, University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History no. 83, August 2010.

  15. Robert Boddice, Edward Jenner (Cheltenham, UK: History Press, 2015).

  16. Dorothy Crawford, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 175.

  17. Francesc Asensi-Botet, “Fighting Against Smallpox Around the World: The Vaccination Expedition of Xavier de Balmis (1803–1806) and Josep Salvany (1803–1810),” Contributions to Science 8, no. 1(2012): 99–105.

  18. Ibid.

  19. A. B. Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  20. Dorothy Crawford, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 175.

  21. Jessica Martucci, “Medicinal Leeches and Where to Find Them,” Science History Institute blog, March 24, 2020, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/medicinal-leeches-and-where-to-find-them.

  22. Farrell, Invisible Enemies.

  23. Jo Nelson Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), p. 132.

  24. Ibid., p. 141.

  25. Ibid., pp. 236–237.

  26. Sheryl Persson, Smallpox, Syphilis and Salvation: Medical Breakthroughs That Changed the World (Dunedin, NZ: Exisle Publishing, 2010).

  27. Ibid.

  28. Paul A. Offit, Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2007).

  29. Ibid., pp. 102–3.

  30. Ernest Drucker, Phillip G. Alcabes, and Preston A. Marx, “The Injection Century: Massive Unsterile Injections and the Emergence of Human Pathogens,” Lancet 358, no. 9297 (2001): 1989–1992.

  31. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 262.

  32. Arthur Allen, The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).

  33. Drucker et al., “The Injection Century” (real dollars in 1998 USD).

  34. Ibid.

  35. Jacques Pepin et al., “Evolution of the Global Burden of Viral Infections from Unsafe Medical Injections, 2000–2010,” PloS One 9, no. 6 (2014).

  36. Quoted by Crawford, Deadly Companions, p. 176.

  37. Donald R. Hopkins, The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 305.

  38. Donald Henderson, “Eradication: Lessons from the Past,” MMWR, December 31, 1999, 48:16–22. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/su48a6.htm.

  39. Crawford, Deadly Companions, p. 222.

  40. Polio Global Eradication Initiative, “Remembering Ali Maalin,” http://polioeradication.org/news-post/remembering-ali-maalin/.

  41. Source: the World Health Organization database. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/gho/database/en/.

  42. Data from the Polio Global Eradication Initiative: http://www.polioeradication.org/dataandmonitoring/poliothisweek.aspx.

  43. Vaccines list from the Centers for Disease Control, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/vaccines-list.html.

  44. James C. Riley, Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  45. World Health Organization, “Miracle Cure for an Old Scourge: An Interview with Dr. Dilip Mahalanabis,” http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/2/09-060209/en/, and Sumati Yengkhom, “Global Glory, but State Apathy for ORS Creator,” Times of India May 13, 2013, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Global-glory-but-state-apathy-for-ORS-creator/articleshow/20022013.cms.

  46. Olivier Fontaine and Charlotte Newton, “A Revolution in the Management of Diarrhoea,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 79, no. 5 (2001): 471–472.

  47. Val Curtis and Sandy Cairncross, “Effect of Washing Hands with Soap on Diarrhoea Risk in the Community: A Systematic Review,” Lancet Infectious Diseases, no. 3 (2003): 275–281.

  48. Rosemary Drisdelle, Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most Unwelcome Guests (Berkeley: University of of California Press, 2010).

  49. Aaron Carroll, “Lessons from the Low-Tech Defeat of Guinea Worm,” New York Times, August 12, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/upshot/lessons-from-the-low-tech-defeat-of-the-guinea-worm-.html.

  50. Pinar Mine Güneş, “The Role of Maternal Education in Child Health: Evidence from a Compulsory Schooling Law,” Economics of Education Review 47 (2015): 1–16.

  51. Source: World Bank data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.BASS.ZS?end=2015&start=2000.

  52. Sonia Bhalotra et al., Urban Water Disinfection and Mortality Decline in Developing Countries, University of Essex Institute for Social and Economic Research Working Paper 2017-04.

  53. Peter Katona and Judit Katona-Apte, “The Interaction Between Nutrition and Infection,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 46, no. 10 (2008): 1582–1588, and Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person.

  54. Cecilia Tacoli, Gordon McGranahan, and David Satterthwaite, “Urbanization, Poverty and Inequity: Is Rural-Urban Migration a Poverty Problem or Part of the Solution,” The New Global Frontier: Urbanization, Poverty and Environment in the 21st Century (2008): 37–53, updated with Goufrane Mansour et al., “Situation Analysis of the Urban Sanitation Sector in Kenya,” 2017, https://www.wsup.com/content/uploads/2017/09/Situation-analysis-of-the-urban-sanitation-sector-in-Kenya.pdf.

  55. Charles Kenny, Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—and How We Can Improve the World Even More (New York: Basic Books, 2012). Maryaline Catillon, David Cutler, and Thomas Getzen, Two Hundred Years of Health and Medical Care: The Importance of Medical Care for Life Expectancy Gains, no. w25330, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018, report that doctors made up 0.8 percent of the US workforce in 1850 and 0.3 percent in 1950—that decline took place during a period of massively improving health (as well as standards among medical practitioners, of course).

  56. Rodrigo R. Soares, “On the Determinants of Mortality Reductions in the Developing World,” Population and Development Review 33, no. 2 (2007): 247–287.

  57. Because infection as a killer skews young, it accounts for a higher proportion of years of life potential lost, but even according to that measure we crossed the line into a greater burden of disease from noncommunicable disease toward the end of last century. In 2000, the World Health Organization estimates that 43 percent of life years were lost to communicable disease. By 2012, that had dropped to around one-third. WHO estimates for 2000–2012 disease burden from http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates/en/index2.html.

  58. John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay, “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly: Health and Society (1977): 405–428.

  59. Alberto Palloni and Randy Wyrick, “Mortality Decline in Latin America: Changes in the Structure of Causes of Deaths, 1950–1975,” Social Biology 28, nos. 3–4 (1981): 187–216.

  60. Rafael Lozano et al., “Global and Regional Mortality from 235 Causes of Death for 20 Age Groups in 1990 and 2010: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010,” Lancet 380, no. 9859 (2013): 2095–2128. I calculate infectious diseases as communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional deaths (Group One), subtracting all maternal, neonatal, and nutritional deaths apart from those attributable to sepsis.

  61. Under-five mortality data from www.gapminder.org.

  62. Yvonne Lefèber and Henk W. A. Voorhoeve, Indigenous Customs in Childbirth and Child Care (Assen, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 1998).

  63. Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010).

  64. Bill Gates, “Why Naming a Child Is a Revolutionary Act,” Impatient Optimists blog http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2013/02/Why-Is-Naming-a-Child-a-Revolutionary-Act.

  65. Max Roser, Life Expectancy (OurWorldInData.org, 2016). Retrieved from http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-statistics/life-expectancy/.

  66. Sources for 2016 GDP PPP per capita, poverty, and life expectancy are the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (https://data.worldbank.org/) and PovcalNet (http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/povOnDemand.aspx). For England and Wales life expectancy, UK Office of National Statistics (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09) and UK GDP PPP per capita, the MaddisonProject website (https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-2018).

  67. Shiyon Wang, P. Marquez, and John Langenbrunner, “Toward a Healthy and Harmonious Life in China: Stemming the Rising Tide of Non-Communicable Diseases,” mimeo, the World Bank, 2011.

  68. Elizabeth Frankenberg, Jessica Y. Ho, and Duncan Thomas, Biological Health Risks and Economic Development, no. w21277, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2015.

  69. Adult obesity data from the Harvard School of Public Health, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-trends/obesity-rates-worldwide/.

  70. World Food Program statistics on hunger: http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats. For an extended discussion of the growth of the noninfectious disease threats, see Thomas J. Bollyky, Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World Is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).

  Chapter Eight: It’s Good to Get Closer

  1. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 262.

  2. Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (2010): 163–188.

  3. Jeanette Farrell, Invisible Enemies: Stories of Infectious Disease (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 154–158.

  4. Watts, Epi
demics and History, p. 258.

  5. Michael B. A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2009), p. 123.

  6. Frederick Fox Cartwright and Michael Denis Biddiss, Disease and History (New York: Marboro Books, 1972), p. 164.

  7. Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 258.

  8. Jo Nelson Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 206–210.

  9. Andrew Spielman and Michael d’Antonio, Mosquito: The Story of Man’s Deadliest Foe (New York: Hyperion, 2002), p. 126.

  10. Marcella Alsan, “The Effect of the Tsetse Fly on African Development,” American Economic Review 105, no. 1 (2015): 382–410.

  11. Quoted in Rosemary Drisdelle, Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most Unwelcome Guests (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 18.

  12. Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 266.

  13. Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).

  14. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo “The Economic Lives of the Poor,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2007): 141.

  15. Data compiled by the Yale University SETO lab, http://urban.yale.edu/data, and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/CD-ROM/.

  16. Edward Glaeser and David Maré, “Cities and Skills,” Journal of Labor Economics 19, no. 2 (2001): 316–342.

  17. R. Dobbs et al., Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities (McKinsey Global Institute, 2011).

  18. Charles Kenny, “Cheer Up Liberals,” Businessweek, November 3, 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-03/cheer-up-liberals-city-dwellers-will-soon-rule-the-world.

  19. See, for example, Alice Evans and Liam Swiss, “Why Do Cities Tend to Disrupt Gender Ideologies and Inequalities?” mimeo, Cambridge University, 2017.