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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> I'd say the same thing about asthma and food allergies too, seems that half the kids today are allergic to something, need inhalers, etc.

I mean, if you were deathly allergic to eggs in the 1800s, you died. Very early.

If smoke sent you into respiratory distress, you died. Very early.

Or see the "left-handedness epidemic". It is probably not massively more prevalent now than it was in 1900s, even if that's what the stats say. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-overall-rate-of-left...

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No real argument, but I'm not talking about that long ago. When I was a kid, lots of parents smoked, in the house, in the car, everywhere. My father did. Yet I don't remember any of my friends having asthma or using inhalers. Peanut allergy is very common today, among my kids friends, several of them had it. Was almost unheard of when I was a kid, schools served peanut butter often at lunch. Nobody was ever asked what food allergies they had.

It's possible my anecdotes are not representative, but this is just what I have observed.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Asthma_prevalence.pn... looks relatively steady over the last ~50 years or so.

> Asthma was recognized in ancient Egypt and was treated by drinking an incense mixture known as kyphi. It was officially named as a specific respiratory problem by Hippocrates circa 450 BC, with the Greek word for "panting" forming the basis of our modern name. In 200 BC, it was believed to be at least partly related to the emotions.

Theodore Roosevelt had asthma.

I think the argument still applies on a shorter timescale. The child mortality rate in the US fell from 26 per thousand in 1970 to 7 in 2020 [1]. It seems reasonable that some portion of kids that now have treatable but persistent illnesses such as allergies/asthma would have died just a few decades ago.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

Absolutely. Most of the "epidemic" that Brain Worm is pointing to is the result of removing a lot of the removable causes of death.

You don't notice nearly as much as a kid as you do as an adult; nor do you get a representative picture of your friends.

Beyond that, there's a question of, while maybe they didn't have an inhaler, how many needed one but didn't get one due to awareness or whatnot? Or how many people had allergic reactions, because we didn't ask about their allergies?

Peanut allergies might be caused by poor advice in some cases. There was a period where people believed that babies should be protected from any food allergens, in case they were allergic. Later research suggested that early exposure to allergens might actually prevent allergies.

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