What are children dying from and what can we do about it? • Hacker News Board

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#21

Post by lopmotr » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them? It might take a lot of generations, but aren't we supposed to value future humans higher than present ones because there will be more of them?

I would have died in childhood without modern medicine, and have a lifelong illness as a consequence of surviving. I may pass that on to my own children. That's a problem that never happened in all human history before about a 100 years ago when useful medicine started to exist, so maybe its effects will be disastrous for the human race. On the other hand, perhaps it's OK if we evolve more dependency on technology. We already need clothes, cooking, and shelter which helps us have advantages and flexibility that animals don't have.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#22

Post by lopmotr » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

ska wrote: post #4

It's an interesting layout but has an annoying feature I've noticed in similar infographics. The division looks like it should be proportional to occurrences, but it is not. EDIT: appears i was bitten by how I was viewing it originally - downloaded the graphic and it appears to be roughly proportional with areas (i.e. I didn't find more than 10% error) mea culpa!

It would help if the 1990 and 2017 boxes were same-width bars because people are good at estimating relative lengths, but not relative areas. But it would also be uglier and asymmetric, so maybe not worth the trade-off.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#23

Post by ummonk » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #21

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them?…

Well not just children. E.g. the proportion of women needing c-sections is increasing.

I don't think dependence on technology would improve human life in the long run, since the genetic maladaptation load would eventually overwhelm the ability of technology to keep up and we'd be back to where we started. But the key is that we're getting the ability to engage in genetic engineering, so realistically we should be applying technology to treat diseases to the best of our ability while we stall for time to get genetic engineering online so we can permanently stave off inherited diseases.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#24

Post by xxxtentachyon » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #21

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them?…

I don’t think this is something to worry about provided general healthiness is still being positively selected for, and we have every reason to believe that it is.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#25

Post by kerkeslager » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:26 AM UTC

> Infectious diseases have always been one of the major causes of child deaths, but the success of vaccination campaigns and antibiotic availability has done a great deal to reduce mortality from infectious diseases. Measles vaccination is a perfect example: the number of measles cases has shrunk by 86% since 1990. The WHO has estimated that between 2000 and 2017 measles vaccination has prevented 21.1 million deaths across Africa.

> Today we also have vaccines available for tuberculosis, meningitis, hepatitis, and whooping cough. The best way to protect children against malaria today is to provide insecticide treated bednets, but a new malaria vaccine implementation program is also underway.

Quoted for emphasis. Note the striking lack of deaths on the chart from autism (which vaccines don't cause).

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#26

Post by Koshkin » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

trentnix wrote: post #3

I looked closely but I didn’t see abortion on the graphic.

It’s hard to get pregnant at 3.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#27

Post by yters » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:46 AM UTC

ska wrote: post #6

trentnix wrote: post #3

I looked closely but I didn’t see abortion on the graphic.

I would think that doesn't belong in a gathering of childhood fatality statistics, pretty much by definition.

Last I checked every abortion kills a child.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#28

Post by yters » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:49 AM UTC

qbonnard wrote: post #5

trentnix wrote: post #3

I looked closely but I didn’t see abortion on the graphic.

Look closer... How else would you explain the decrease in congenital birth defects? Eugenism?

If birth defects are passed on from parent genes, I don't think abortion can explain a constant rate of decrease. It can explain it in the 'kill all the defective' sense (Iceland), but not 'cleaning the gene pool' sense.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#29

Post by yters » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:51 AM UTC

By far and away abortion kills the most children. Something like 56 million globally every year, the population of the US every 6 years. Think of that. The entire US wiped out every few year. For the most part entirely voluntarily.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#30

Post by flukus » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 3:08 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #21

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them?…

> I may pass that on to my own children

A more palatable approach would be to treat you but not allow you to have children with the same condition. In the past this has been done in fairly barbaric ways but embryo selection offers a far more reasonable solution with minimal limitations on individual rights.

As for whether we should treat children and condemn them to a life of suffering, we already do this calculus with the elderly. Whether or not to perform a procedure depends on the chances of success and the number of quality years they can expect to have afterwards, procedures that will extend life by a year and result in a bedridden patient are routinely skipped, it's only applying the same to children that makes us squeamish.

My friends an ambulance driver and recently had to transport a blind, deaf and mentally retarded baby with a chronic heart condition. The question all the doctors and nurses in the hospital had to ask that night is whether they should treat the child if their heart fails. For me at least the answer is an obvious no in that case.