How come that the disease wasn't widespread earlier?
We just don’t think about it because we’ve defeated it completely by putting iodine in the most popular spice, and also people in the past were afflicted by all sorts of horrible illnesses. It doesn’t stand out from the noise of the past being generally a mess.
The article just read like there were some unusual strange things going on around 1900 in Switzerland.
Other places in the world had different geology and this different levels of natural iodine.
Iodine had not been seen as a successful cure before because excess iodine causes a horrible condition. The key difference here was that Hunziker proposed regular use in minute quantities, and then Bayard tested the hypothesis with careful measurements and convincing evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodized_salt#In_public_health_...
> Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.[1][2] According to public health experts, iodisation of salt may be the world's simplest and most cost-effective measure available to improve health, only costing US$0.05 per person per year
I don't question the initiative.
The article just read like it was some strange illness that affected Switzers around a certain time.
I think, that Switzerland, and especially those remote mountain regions, stayed more isolated than similar regions in France or Austria well into the early 20th century, making the issue stand out more in comparison.
Austria I don't know. Many Austrian had the reverse problem with too much iodin and basedov eyes.
The word Switzer isn’t in use since a very long time :)
I think it comes from a generalised distrust of governments/big institutions. Which comes from hearing (often heavily distorted) stories about things like Tuskegee Syphilis, MKULTRA, CIA vaccinators in Afghanistan and Thalidomide.
And there are loads of examples through history up till current day that show that blindly trusting authorities is naive. Heck, even in the article, some doctors were poisoning their patients with iodine. It is not far fetched that some people in these areas were informed of these problems. So a tiny amount kills us... and so you are saying any even tinier amount will save us. I'd be pretty skeptical too.
It seems that when presented well and with personally verifiable evidence, people were willing to accept.
I am really flabbergasted when people blindly accept in mass what authorities tell us.
"The interests of people in the thyroid gland have always been immense because of the widespread prevalence of its diseases. Therefore the earliest references to the gland date back to 1st century AD. The Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Greek and Byzantine medicines are especially rich in their knowledge on the subject."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_iodine_deficiency...
The article makes reference to the Madonna on the Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece having an obvious goiter. That was produced in the late 15th to early 16th century. That’s evidence from the article that the problem was so common then that it was depicted in sacred art.
Maps with goiter prevalence can be found on the WHO's website: https://www.who.int/teams/nutrition-and-food-safety/database...
Oh, and here in Germany it's on place 6?! Wouldn't have guessed!