The Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has been warning of the dangers of social media on young children and proposes warning labels for them. I am not sure what form that it will take and how effective it would be (assuming that it ever gets enacted) but it did make me think of one of the biggest positive acts by a former Surgeon General and that was the warning labels on tobacco packs promoted by his predecessor C. Everatt Koop. “As Surgeon General, he released eight reports on the health consequences of tobacco use, including the first report on the health consequences of involuntary tobacco smoke exposure. During Koop’s tenure as Surgeon General, smoking rates in the United States declined significantly from 38% to 27%”.
Thanks to actions like those taken by the government in those days, we now have cleaner air and water, fluoride in the water, and bans on the widespread use of some pesticides like DDT.
We also had the ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were destroying the ozone layer. That story of how the fight against that harmful chemical was won by scientists can be read here.
The crucial evidence supporting the CFC hypothesis came from British scientists working at the Halley Bay Station of the British Antarctic Survey, who had been taking ground-based measurements of total ozone for decades. In 1984, Joseph C. Farman (1930-2013) and his colleagues at BAS studied the raw data and found that stratospheric ozone had decreased greatly since the 1960s. In 1985, the scientists published an article in Nature announcing that stratospheric ozone over Antarctica was reduced 40% in September, the end of the austral winter.
The Antarctic ozone hole, as it came to be known, made depletion of the ozone layer a real and present danger to lawmakers and the public at large. Predictions of significant increases in the incidence of skin cancer resulting from continued use of CFCs spurred international action. In 1987, 56 countries agreed under what became known as the Montreal Protocol to cut CFC production and use in half. In subsequent years, the protocol was strengthened to require an eventual worldwide phaseout of the production of CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals.
Two years after the ozone hole was discovered in 1987, international treaties were put in place that cut the use of CFCs by 50%. Today the use of CFCs is banned by 197 countries and the ozone layer is slowly recovering.
But those were more innocent times, when public health recommendations by scientists and health professionals were taken seriously and acted upon, and not viewed by a significant segment of the US population and by the Republican party as some plot by the deep state to harm god-fearing Merkins. I cannot imagine the CFC ban being enacted in the US today. You would hear scornful dismissals in right wing media and Republican politicians about how absurd it was to worry about a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic and how taking away a cheap refrigerant was a colossal infringement on the fundamental right to cheap air-conditioning.
We now have the climate crisis, an even greater threat to the planet than a depleted ozone layer, but it is dismissed by these people as nothing to worry about, even though the threats posed by global warming is far more imminent and obvious than the CFC threat.
We also have the problem of too much plastics everywhere and the so-called forever chemical knowns as PFAS that are harmful to human health and getting into everything everywhere.
I am not sure if and when we will get back to a time when concern about public health and public pressure would be strong enough to overcome the lobbying by wealthy business interests to prevent any action. Perhaps what is needed is a strong repudiation of those politicians and policies that ignore the scientific consensus about important issues.
If fifty years ago we had a Republican party likes today’s, the entire population of the world would now be suffering heavy metal poisoning from the use of leaded gasoline.
Just when we need science to solve what are truly existential problems, people are turning away from it. I can’t say I’m hopeful about the future of humanity.
This is before my time, but I’ve read and heard accounts of people who lived through it, that whenever there was a measles outbreak, the authorities posted a quarantine sign on the door and people stayed inside until the illness passed. I think this would never pass now because of the MAH FREEDUMBS crowd.
repeal seatbelt laws. they literally restrict freedom.
(sure, they help keep you from being thrown from your car in an accident, but, FREEDUMB!!!1!!!)
One public health measure that hasn’t gone too far is requiring helmets for motorcycle riders.
Less than half the states have universal helmet laws.
The usual argument is that it is people’s right to risk their brains and lives while riding motorcycles. My brain, my right to risk smashing it in.
It’s not really free from costs to society though.
The medical care is paid by insurance and various government medical programs.
And it can cost the survivors of a crash victim a lot.
FWIW, a grade school friend of mine died as a teenager in a motorcycle crash.
He was not wearing a helmet and died instantly from a head injury.
Public health has been thrown back 150 years during this pandemic. Oncology nurses and transplant ward doctors will happily point out to patients they don’t have to wear masks anymore. Capitalism and its affiliated doctors have come up with inventions like immunity debt and hybrid immunity, things that do not exist.
Also “pseudo-addiction” from opioids, because opioids are TOTALLY NON-ADDICTIVE!
raven @5: Then there is the story of bike helmets. Here in Washington state they are regulated by each city separately, so you can easily cycle from a city that doesn’t require them to one that does. The arguments against requiring helmets are that the requirement makes it more likely that people just avoid cycling in the first place; and also that requiring helmets makes bike-share unworkable.
@3 Katydid
My mother used to tell of being quarantined with scarlet fever in a small town in Michigan probably around 1920. Her father used to joke to his sister-in-law that he was going to post a quarantine sign to keep her out. Sister-in-law saw sign, charged in to tell my grandfather what she thought of the joke. She stay about a week under quarentine.
Two years after the ozone hole was discovered in 1987, international treaties were put in place that cut the use of CFCs by 50%. Today the use of CFCs is banned by 197 countries and the ozone layer is slowly recovering.
Except that it wasn’t two years after the problem was discovered, it was over a decade after the problem was discovered. Scientists had been trying to ban CFCs to save the ozone layer since at least 1976. Business interests immediately moved to bribe politicians to insist that we didn’t know what we knew and prevent anyone doing anything to fix the problem. The discovery of the ozone hole just frightened everyone into actually taking action that scientists had been pushing for for many years at that point.
It’s the same thing with leaded gasoline. We’d known it was poisoning people since at least 1936, but the lead industry rapidly published fake papers to pretend that it was perfectly safe and bribed politicians to take no action until the evidence eventually became overwhelming and public outcry forced politicians to finally act in the seventies.
The modern Republican party isn’t some new force stopping action on climate change. It’s the same old forces of capitalism, greedy politicians and an uneducated public that we’ve always had. What makes this one worse, in my opinion, is just the massive scale of the problem gives Big Business more motivation to keep fighting and bribing, while making the public ever less willing to actually take action against the problem, and willing to swallow the corporate gaslighting.
[Michael Suttkus, yup]