What is happening to health in this wonderful country of ours?

[Newportnobby]

OK. I freely admit this has nothing to do with railways, real or model, but it has been baffling me for many a year and i thought I'd throw it out to our erudite 'collective to see if someone can educate me.
Where have all these allergies and syndromes etc come from? We have wheat, gluten, nut, dairy and Lord knows what allergies and this morning a new one on me has popped up in the news i.e. '22Q Deletion Syndrome' (who came up with that moniker?) I confess to being in my mid 60s and can't remember all these tribulations being visited on anyone I knew when I was younger. Maybe it's just they were there and no one understood them or had given them any credence/importance? I suspect despite best efforts to pollute this world with plastics, fossil fuels etc society has become too sanitised to the extent our immune systems can't fight the 'bugs'. I can remember playing in the gutter with melted tar, living with steam railways, making mud pies and my Mum always wondering where I got the water from and so on. I do feel great sympathy for those afflicted by allergies and think it's quite horrific someone can die simply from a nut or sting.
Did I just live in a bubble in my youth or is it really a more recent thing? I would really appreciate those living in other countries giving their views so I can get an idea if this is a world wide thing or more localised.

[Bealman]

Same situation here, Mick. When I was teaching, info on kids with nut allergy were posted in every staff room, and we had to do training on how to punch the adrenaline needle into kids legs.

[port perran]

I do think that maybe we are all to over sanitised  as Mick says.
My mother used to say "You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die".

[Karhedron]

Maybe these conditions have been on the rise but a big factor is better diagnosis. We have tests that did not exist a generation ago for conditions that are mostly uncomfortable, rather than life threatening (peanut allergies excepted obviously). This is the reason for the increase in conditions like ADHD, Dyslexia and Aspergers. It is not that the conditions have become more common, we have just got better at recognizing and diagnosing them. 50 years ago, kids with one or more of the above conditions would have simply been called "difficult" (or worse) and left to struggle. Now we know that they can achieve just as much as their neruo-typical counterparts with the right support.

Another reason for this increase in diagnosis is that paradoxically, we are in fact healthier. Huge swathes of childhood diseases that have killed or crippled millions throughout history are largely banished thanks to immunisation. As a nation, we have the longest life expectancy in history. That frees up medical effort to diagnose and treat people with conditions that affect quality of life rather than just quantity.

[Karhedron]

Just a personal hunch but I wonder how much the drop in breast-feeding has affected health. My wife chose to breast-feed all 3 of our kids until they were fully weaned, they never had formula at all and continued to receive breast milk until just before they started school. They are now 13, 10 and 5 respectively and none of them has any sign of allergies. Furthermore, between them, they have only ever had one course of antibiotics in their combined 28 years.

[daffy]

A lot of this can be put down to what we could call the 'Zanussi Syndrome' - that is, the 'apply-ance of science'.

And then to the explosion in scientific understanding of the human condition, you have to add in the effect of all those chemicals we now inflict upon our delicate human mechanisms, from pills, to aerosols, to additives, and to anything else you care to mention that has a chemical formula that man has devised for the improvement of the human race.

How we personally define or understand 'improvement' is a matter for debate - and one I won't join.

[njee20]

The obvious counter to the above is that life expectancy is up, and infant mortality is down compared to 50 years ago. You could certainly conclude we're not "less healthy".

We are fatter though.

[MalcolmInN]

I was going to say "sickly" children as some were known in my day as well as "difficult"
So as well as more diagnosis we have more names (for the same things) to worry about.

Also we have a greater tabloid and other media appetite for alarm.
The few cases per year of a child dying from a badly labelled sandwich would not have made the lofty papers and the Home Service, they were all about calm and reassurance (in my day, which precedes even NPN's advanced  lofty  years )

[Newportnobby]

You could certainly conclude we're not "less healthy".

We are fatter though.

I don't think anyone has implied we are less healthy - more a case of asking whether allergies etc are a relatively new development or just something 'hidden' all those years ago. I think the 'fat' point might be contentious as it's not something humans are born with and, to start off the contention, I lay obesity firmly at the door of digital technology and computers. My argument is when I was a kid we'd go out and play all day every day and parents had difficulties in getting us in for meals. Nowadays there is so much to just sit and do/watch it's no wonder obesity is rife.
I haven't yet had the courage to say to a heart consultant "don't tell me to cut down on this and that while (at my best guess) 70% of your nurses are clinically obese"
Now I must get off the forum and put this packet of choc chip cookies away

[njee20]

Yes, the irony of so many healthcare professionals being obese certainly isn't lost on me!

[MalcolmInN]

a new one on me has popped up in the news i.e. '22Q Deletion Syndrome' (who came up with that moniker?)

I dont know is the simple answer !
but it is a new(ish) name for DiGeorge., from at least 1965, and probably other names before that (cleft palette amongst them )
I added (ish) because it isnt all that new, just that it has risen to the attention of today's media !

Oh, yes, another thing - we didnt have Google to get us all worried about things when we self-diagnose on-line. 

[MalcolmInN]

We are fatter though.

we may be, but We are not, We are a sylph-like 8&1/2 stone 5'7" oldie, and a metric-free zone as well.

[RailGooner]

It's all my boss's fault!

[NeMo]

Where have all these allergies and syndromes etc come from?

Nobody knows. Lots of hypotheses. Better/earlier diagnoses explain some, but not all.

i.e. '22Q Deletion Syndrome' (who came up with that moniker?)

It's how genetics works as a science. A deletion implies that certain bases (the A, C, G and T you learned at school, perhaps) are missing. The first number in any genetic condition denotes which of the 23 pairs of chromosomes is involved. So in this case, some bases are missing from the 22nd chromosome. Some mutations simply swap one base for another, which may have no effect (a silent mutation) or alter the particular gene involved (often for the worse if the resulting protein no longer works properly). But deletions are much more serious because they cause frame shifting -- i.e, every single subsequent gene is now messed up.

It's like this. A normal set of bases might be represented by these words:

CAT HAT CUP DOG BEE THE...

They're in threes to represent the way each triplet of bases corresponds (theoretically) with one amino acid. There's more to it than that once you start accounting for triplets that don't code, introns, but for now, this'll do. Anyway, if I change one base, one of those words is messed up:

CAT HIT CUP DOG BEE THE...

That one messed up gene is now faulty. But delete a base, i.e., a letter, and things become much different:

CAT HTC UPD OGB EET HE...

See the difference? I'm not sure this is the case here, not being "that kind of doctor", but deletions are bad news. Sometimes the deletions remove multiples of three bases, which isn't so bad because the subsequent bases aren't messed up so much, as here, if I remove HAT:

CAT CUP DOG BEE THE...

Did I just live in a bubble in my youth or is it really a more recent thing?

Absolutely, yes, the bubble is the explanation here. Go back 70 years and the British were less healthy by any objective measurement. Life expectancy; prevalence of childhood diseases such as polio;  infant mortality around childbirth; you name it. What's changed are a number of things that affect your perception, such as:

• You didn't see all the dead babies and/or weren't aware of them. Mortality rate of infants at birth in 1960 around 22 per thousand; now fewer than 5 per thousand.
• We're living longer so the nature of the most common diseases has shifted from those affecting children and infants towards diseases affecting older people.
• Our lifestyles, including diet, has changed, trending the population towards diseases caused by, for example, too much food rather than nutrient deficiencies. So we see more obese children, but fewer with rickets.

In a sense what's happened is that while fewer children die per thousand, the proportion of children dealing with things like obesity has increased. Since you didn't see the dead children in, say, 1950, but do see the obese children today, it's very easy to "read" the situation as "children are getting unhealthy". Make sense?

Another massive factor among children is that they're growing bigger, and faster, and that means some things, notably menstruation in girls, kicks in much earlier than it did in the 1950s. This in turn brings with it all sorts of new health issues that didn't exist in the past.

A big misunderstanding among the general population is the difference between "health" and "fitness". Britain's population is, by and large, healthy. But their fitness has declined for all sorts of reasons. Less physical activity at work is a major factor, but children also do less sport or even simple active play today than they did in the past.

Whether any of this is directly linked to increasing food allergies, for example, is unknown. But there aren't any simple solutions, and anyone telling you "it was better when I was growing up" almost certainly hasn't a clue about what they're talking about. A baby born today has a much greater chance of survival than one born in 1950, and on top of that, can expect to live a much longer lifespan.

Cheers, NeMo

[njee20]

We are fatter though.

we may be, but We are not, We are a sylph-like 8&1/2 stone 5'7" oldie, and a metric-free zone as well.

I am definitely fatter than I was, currently at 74kg and 5'10", to mix my measurements. My waife like 65kg days are behind me, along with the fitness of the time!