In 1908, the five leading causes of death were -

[Bobbieo]

1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke

BUT the average life span was only 47!

Where was cancer????

[Magrittes Pipe]

1. People didn't live long enough to get cancer.

[Kutjara]

2. I suppose you could argue...

...that people didn't live long enough to get the cancers that tend to show up in later life. Since a lot of the more common ones, such as breast, lung, and prostate, tend to occur later in life, a large part of the population would already be dead before they were old enough to get them.

[Speck Tater]

3. CAncer takes longer to develop. Plus, ADULT lifespans were a lot higher than 47.

Total lifespan figures include the large number of infant deaths and childhood diseases that are now pretty much non-existent. Once a person reached adulthood, however, their lifespan was about the same as ours.

[ananda]

4. hmm

Cancer was there all right, but I expect people
were dying from those other five diseases first.

Now people live long enough to get cancer, and
factors causing carcinogenesis are more prevalent.

Sue

[jakem]

5. Diagnosis has changed with knowledge-

diarrhea then could be crohns disease now, or cancer, or etc etc...

some catch all terms like "nerves" and "exhaustion" change the picture as well-


medicine is always limited by it's vocabulary. i am a practitioner of Chinese medicine, and often the incurable in western terms makes perfect sense and is treatable in the Chinese system, etc-

[ashling]

23. Also reporting

another major cause, though not on this list, was oficially listed as "old age" That has only been discontinued as an official cause of death within my lifetime.

[TZ]

24. So the chinese can cure cancer?

Really. Why are they holding back on us.
I would also like to know how chinese medicine will stop my marrow from making too many platelets?
Sorry..but this idiocy that ancient medicine is somehow superior to western medicine cause its OLD makes no sense to me.

[lolly]

25. Diarrhea assoc iated with infant mortality

I don't think that many adults died from diarrhea, but severe diarrhea can be very deadly for small infants, who can dehydrate quickly. Even today, it's a reason to hospitalize babies.

[hedgehog]

26. I suspect it was more likely dysentery, Remember, that includes a

lot of children and babies, just as in the 3rd world today.

[librechik]

6. cancer started spiking as more farmers used chem fertilizer with radioactive isotopes

and more people smoke cigarettes raised on that fertilizer.

http://www.tobacco.org/Documents/dd/ddradioactivecigs.html

:
June 3, 2000

This confidential Philip Morris (PM) memorandum from 1980 reveals that PM knew that smoke from their cigarettes contained radioactive lead and polonium, and that it was derived from the uranium in the calcium phosphate fertilizers that were regularly used on tobacco-growing soils. As the writer of this memo states most straightforwardly,

"210-Pb and 210-Po are present in tobacco and smoke...."

They also knew that switching to another fertilizer could probably help the situation. Here's what they had to say about that:

"..using ammonium phosphate instead of calcium phosphate as fertilizer is probably a valid but expensive point...."

CITATION
Title: Newscript: Radioactive Cigarettes
Type of Document: confidential memorandum
Author Comes, R.A. - Philip Morris Tobacco Co. Recipient: Osdene, T.S. - Philip Morris Tobacco Co.
Date: 19800402
Site: Philip Morris document site http://www.pmdocs.com/
Page Count 2
Bates No. 2012611337/1338
URL: http://www.pmdocs.com/getallimg.asp?DOCID=2012611337/1338



If we farmed organically, a lot of the cancer danger would go away. But Big Agra won't.

[varkam]

13. 1908. Not 1980. eom

[librechik]

14. 1980 is just when the study was published. Naturally the practice started earlier.

[varkam]

15. So farmers were using fertilizer with radioactive isotopes in 1908?

Interesting.

[librechik]

16. And pharmacists were using radium to cure this and that during the same era.

And lead in various forms was still being used widely until about 1980.

The scandal comes from the fact that they still use such stuff, even after knowing how deadly it is. Smokers actually read elevated on a geiger counter immediately after smoking a cig.

I don't however know where you got the 1908 figure. not in my OP.

[varkam]

18. Because the OP was about the leading causes of death in 1908.

I thought maybe you had misread the OP, since your posted noted 1980. You responded by saying that it had been going on earlier than that.

[librechik]

19. oriiginal post wondered why cancer not a leading cause in 08--I responded why

cancer (probably) became a leading cause later on, while it was not in 08. Exposures to exotic chemicals, though it happened, really became widespread long after 08, which is why cancer cases started to grow, until nowadays 1 in 3 deaths is cancer related.

[varkam]

20. Ah, I see. Sorry!

:hi:

[Warpy]

7. The life span was 47

because pneumonia, especially, was a comorbidity of the usual childhood diseases. Instead of listing measles (eg) as the COD, they'd list the pneumonia that followed. With no vaccines or antibiotics, children died of diseases we no longer consider deadly. They were. That greatly lowered the overall life expectancy.

Diarrhea occurred because there were no food or water safety standards. The germ theory was in its infancy and a lot of towns simply hadn't caught on yet.

There was just as much cancer then as now, but you had to survive childhood diseases, rotten teeth, buggy water, bad food, and every other thing we've fought over the last 100 years to get it. It just didn't make the top 5.

Even then, the immediate COD was probably listed as heart failure.

[SharonAnn]

10. And sinus infections led to pneumonia and death, also.

My former GP who trained in Los Angeles in the 1950s said that half the beds in the County Hospital were pneumonia patients and the death rate was high. Even 50 years ago.

[depakid]

8. sepsis was right up there, too

You could easily die from an abscessed tooth!

People don't appreciate modern dentistry....

[enlightenment]

12. One of my great-great aunts died when she was two -

cause of death in the mortality schedule was "teething."

The mortality schedule is a fascinating snapshot of life and dying, if anyone is interested in that sort of thing. They only collected them in the census years 1850-1880 though.

http://www.mortalityschedules.com/

[Deja Q]

9. Well, if it were March, Cancer would be seen in the sky next to Leo and Canis Minor

[Kelvin Mace]

11. But that was the "good old days"

You know, back before all those taxes and regulations that have destroyed the American way of life and added 30 years to our life expectancy.

[wtmusic]

17. Much of it went undiagnosed. nt

[LeftishBrit]

21. People mostly died of the other things before they got cancer...

By the way, it should be noted that while nowadays heart disease tends to be either congenital or a disease of old age, 100 years ago (indeed, until the advent of antibiotics) many young people developed heart disease as a result of rheumatic fever.

The deaths from diarrhoea are particularly tragic, both because most of the victims were children, and because most of the deaths could have been prevented with a simple salt/sugar solution, but this was not known at the time.

[moc]

22. The strongest predictor of life expectancy at birth is the infant mortality rate. In 1908,

the infant mortality rate (IMR) was 1/10. Today, it is ~7 per 1000.

The other major factor contributing to the change in the leading causes of death was the introduction of antibiotics. Only when mortality due to infectioous diseases was brought under control with antibiotics, did neoplasms "rise to the top" to become a leading cause of death.