Questions tagged [public-health]
The public-health tag has no usage guidance.
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Is there a record of a rabid human attacking another human?
I was just reading the Wikipedia page on rabies, and the following claim is made:
Although it is theoretically possible for rabies-infected humans to transmit it to others by biting or otherwise, no ...
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How long was the lung cancer knowledge gap between big tobacco and publically available information?
How long can a huge, deadly secret be kept? According to this paper, evidence was accumulating from lung-cancer studies in the 1940's-1950's, but in 1960 only 1/3 of doctors knew. The official warning ...
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Did medieval kingdoms issue health related guidelines?
Today national health protection agencies around the world such as CDC in United States often issue health and personal hygiene guidelines during pandemics or epidemic or where a large population of ...
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What did a 19th century New Orleans Yellow Fever immunity passport look like?
In response to proposals for a so-called "immunity passport" system to be developed so that people who have recovered from COVID-19 can return to life as usual (without being subject to ...
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How sophisticated were efforts to track the spread of past pandemics?
I am currently inquiring into the COVID Tracking Project for a first-year university course. I would like to give some historical context, i.e. past attempts at epidemic tracking.
Searching the web ...
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How are historical nutrition data gathered?
In the book 'Sapiens', Yuval N. Harari mentions that after the Agricultural Revolution child mortality soared because of malnutrition. While I can see how eating only carbohydrate-based products leads ...
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Were cities that enacted lockdowns during the 1918 flu pandemic successful in preventing any infections? [closed]
Many parallels are currently being drawn between the flu pandemic of 1918 and the modern spread of the coronavirus, including how a lockdown was imposed in many cities:
It happened a century ago, ...
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Why would "loose women" give you bad health?
Many times over the years, I have heard in various contexts, in many different variations, basically the phrase/sentiment:
My secret to staying healthy is simply to never smoke, drink or use
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Why was compulsory vaccination abandoned in the UK?
There is currently talk in the UK of making school attendance conditional on vaccination. Similar schemes operate in various places around the world now.
Vaccination against smallpox was compulsory ...
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Where (if anywhere) were X-ray machines put on trains or trolleys to image "Everybody over 14 years old"?
The background image in this X-ray analysis sotfware page shows what looks like a trolley or train car on tracks with a sign that says "X-ray Now: Everybody over 14 years old".
Where might ...
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What's the earliest evidence of drug abuse?
Let's define drug abuse as drug use that is harmful to to the user or to others. Evidence of alcohol and opiates go back thousands of years, but some reading hasn't revealed when these substances ...
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Which STD did adults & children have in Kamchatka?
In 1817 Vasili Golovnin sailed a ship named Kamchatka from Kronstadt to Kamchatka and met there its governor, Rikord. In "Around the World", he wrote that:
Almost all the local common people of ...
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Where were ancient Romans supposed to dispose of their waste and garbage?
On page 35 of Gregory Aldrete's Daily Life in the Roman City he states "The majority of sewage that found its way into the system did not come directly from latrines [...] Most waste was dumped in the ...
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When were the first deaths from the Spanish Flu Pandemic?
I've found information about the first newspaper articles featuring information about the Spanish Flu Pandemic from this link but one of the quotations from the newspaper says:
“The epidemic is of ...
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Did Ancient China use lead in their food/water industry as much as the Romans?
The Romans used lead a lot. Water pipes might be the most famous, but there were lead plates and lead vessels to prepare food or drink too.
Apparently lead was an inevitable byproduct of silver ...
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Was there a time when it was easier for slaves than citizens to access state-sponsored medical facilities in Ancient Rome?
The Wikipedia article Medicine in Ancient Rome has this to say on the first hospitals in Rome:
The Roman medical system saw the establishment of the first hospitals;
these were reserved for ...
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Was Rickets commented on as an impediment to Slavery in the North?
The body is able to manufacture vitamin D from exposure to UV light. Dark skinned people will receive less sunlight than a light skinned person because much UV is blocked.
I once visited Baltimore, ...
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Has scurvy occurred on land outside the Russian Far East?
James Gibson's "Feeding the Russian Fur Trade" mentions episodes of scurvy occurring during the expansion into the Russian Far East (Northern Siberia and Okhostk Seaboard). These lands were inhabited, ...
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Did starvation or malnutrition occur in indigenous American societies?
Colonizers of the Americas often paid natives for work in food, and justified the certainty in doing so as an improvement over the supposedly hazardous, unpredictable lifestyle those natives ...
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Is there a historical precedent to the vaccine scare?
Today many people believe that vaccines cause autism. Is there a historical equivalent to this conspiracy theory, in that people believe something to be harmful when it has been proven benign by ...
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When did people first started to consider lead poisoning as a possible problem?
In our modern view lead poisoning is very bad for cognitive development and might even bring people to commit more crimes.
When in history did people first started to see lead as a possible problem?
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Why was there a perceived high rate of AIDS infection among Haitians?
In the early days of AIDS, the disease was referred to by the CDC as the 4H disease, due to their high infection among hemophiliacs, homosexuals, heroin users, and Haitians. The first three groups are ...
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Why did families in 6th century Mecca send their babies to be raised in the desert?
Biographies of Muhammad mentions that in his early childhood he was looked after by a wet-nurse Halimah, from a few days after his birth until he was 4. It seems customary for Meccan families to do so:...
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