Preppermed 101: When Children Died Young

When Children Died Young

Nearly all first-world children today live until adulthood, and most can expect to die as senior citizens.

What most people living in first-world countries fail to realize is that low child-mortality is a new thing historically. A VERY new thing. 

Preppers are people who see past the “norm” and we ask ourselves “what if” a lot. What if the Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF). We ask “What if we have a full or partial societal collapse?”.

Preppers often look to the past, to the “old ways of doing things” when we consider and plan what we would do if we lose electricity, modern transportation, organized medicine, instant communications, etc.

This article isn’t about following “the old ways”.

Those old ways killed a whole lot of children.

This article is about learning WHY the old ways didn’t work, and fixing the problems that our ancestors simply didn’t know how to. 

Here’s a podcast we did on the subject as well:

We are 21st Century People, we know what kills children

Unlike nearly everybody before Louis Pasteur started his research in the late 1850’s, we know what germs are…

Also unlike everybody who lived before 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, we know what antibiotics are.

We have learned so much, and advanced to a point where childhood mortality, while not entirely unknown, is a relatively rare thing.

Let’s take a look at history, and then let’s talk about how we stop child mortality from shooting through the roof in our own communities if the Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF).

The Good Old Days, When Half The Children Died Before Age 5

Throughout most of recorded human history, about half of the children born died before the age of five. Infant mortality was so bad that in many cultures, children weren’t even named until they reached a certain age because they were expected to die.

There was also a correspondingly high death rate of mothers due to many factors, but in this article we are basically just going to stick with the childhood deaths.

Childhood mortality has been improving over the last 200 years, from “absolutely horrific” to “still way too high”. There’s also been a shift in childhood deaths as the “first world” countries have developed and separated themselves from “second” and “third world” states.

As late as 1800 (when statistics on such things first started becoming somewhat reliable), 43 percent of children born in the world died before the age of five, according to the Child Mortality statistics provided by Our World In Data.

To quote Our World In Data:

In 1800 the health conditions of our ancestors were such that 43% of the world’s newborns died before their 5th birthday. These estimates are shown in the visualization below.

In 1960 child mortality was still 18.5%. Almost every 5th child born in that year died in childhood.

Over the last decades we have seen a very rapid decline of child mortality globally. In 2015 child mortality was down to 4.3% – 10-fold lower than 2 centuries ago. You have to take this long perspective to see the progress that we have achieved.

So what’s going on here? Why has children’s help improved so much? Well, why not turn this article over to our resident pathophysiologist, Spice, to take it on home from here. 

Note: Here are two main factors, there are many more but these two are the ‘biggies’.

Hygiene

There’s no question what killed, still kills, the greatest number of babies and small children. Diarrheal diseases. And there’s no question how most of those diarrheal diseases got to the children: Water contaminated by poor waste management. In short, bad hygiene kills. 

That’s why we here at 3BY spend so time and effort talking about unfun topics like latrines, composting toilets, and effective hand-washing systems. Water purification is also critical, because even if you’re being careful you can’t trust that the folks upstream are too.

Improvement of hygiene is the single biggest reason for the drop in child mortality, bar none. There is another big contributor, though.

Vaccines

Just some facts: Tetanus bacilli are naturally occurring in soils found under the feet of nearly everyone reading this….basically everyone not on a ship or in Antarctica. These bacteria colonize wounds when the get the opportunity. If they colonize successfully and there is no anti-toxin available, the infected person will die. The best ways to prevent successfully colonization are washing wounds (reduces but doesn’t prevent infections) and priming your immune system to defend against the bacteria by prior exposure: vaccination.

Very many people, adult and children alike, used to die from tetanus. The bacterium is still there. Good washing reduces chances of infection. That’s why tetanus deaths dropped before the vaccine was introduced. Nevertheless, unvaccinated people who know to wash do still regularly get tetanus. And without anti-toxin, they still die. The threat is still real. And it’s an ugly death.

Is every vaccine that critical? No, in that not every germ lives right underfoot; and not every infection is so fatal. What’s your risk tolerance? Many of the childhood diseases don’t kill most of the kids who get them, but do leave some percentage either dead or permanently impaired. How much risk are you willing to take with the kid’s health?

A quick caveat:

We are people who put our support behind peer reviewed, reproducible laboratory reports not social politics. The information we base our views on vaccines isn’t hearsay, it comes with actual scientific evidence behind it.

We understand that there is an active “anti-vax” movement, and while we certainly respect everybody’s right to believe anything they like, we are not going to provide a platform for spreading those views.

While we welcome comments, we are not going to be spreading non-scientific anti-vax views throughout the internet so non-science based comments debating vaccinations won’t be approved.

Any anti-vax comments based on and quoting quality, peer-reviewed scientific literature however we will approve. Show us the peer-reviewed research from reputable journals supporting your theory and we are all-ears.