rg20+@andrew.cmu.edu (Rick Francis Golembiewski) (02/01/89)
In article <674@intvax.UUCP> morimoto@intvax.UUCP (Alan Morimoto)] writes: > you can see that there are millions if not billions >of people out there that would not be alive today if it were not for >medical reearch and developments in new pharmaceuticals. Yet what do we >accomplish by all of this. We end up with a lot of sick people that would not >survive without medical help. Not in all cases, keep in mind that vaxcines (especially weakened versions of pathogens) can strengthen the population against a certain diseases (ie how many people do you know how have had polio?). Also, if you can cure an illness then you don't have dependence, however for the things we can't cure (ie diabeties, etc.) the treatments usually are aimed at controlling the desease in order to give the person a better life (or life itself), I really doubt that you could convince a diabetic to stop taking insulin and take his chances in order to help the genetic pool... >So, if there were a major disaster that restricted medical professionals to >treating those who were injured, i.e. a war, then we would have a lot of >dying people out there, dying from cronic illnesses Actually I would think more healthy people would be killed in the event of a major disaster, then sick people dying from lack of care after the fact (after all it would take pretty a pretty MAJOR disaster to take out most medical care, especially for an extended amount of time, since a good deal of sick people can survive one their own for a while with out medical treatment, BTW if there are any diabetics reading, how large of an insulin supply do you keep? and even if you ran out, how long could you survive with a carefully controlled diet?). > I can imagine that countries that are not as medically advanced inherit a > stronger gene pool of people simply because the weak will perish. Humm.. depends on your definition of "stronger", but I suppose that if you mean resistance to disease, then I don't think the effect would be so dramatic as to endanger the survival of medically advanced socities, also consider that in 3rd word countries a lot of "strong" genes are lost because of higher death rates in general (If you have no food it doesn't really matter how good your resistance to diesase is...), also many diseases don't show up until OLD AGE (ie AFTER breeding has taken place), so those types of disease (ie heart disease) and diseases that depend heavily on environmental factors (ie cancer) won't change significantly. Also keep in mind that recessive genes & birth defects (sometimes caused by environmental factors!!) are responsible for many disorders, so even if these individuals were left to die the diseases are still present in the pool (it is REALLY hard to totally eliminate recessive genes, mainly because it is pretty hard to tell [especially without medical technology!] who carries are, until they have children. // Rick Golembiewski rg20+@andrew.cmu.edu \\ \\ #include stddisclaimer.h // \\ "I never respected a man who could spell" // \\ -M. Twain //