In the absence of advanced medical interventions, would the impact of infectious diseases on human society increase overtime?

Kinoshita Yoshikazu (pseudonym)

[Question]

In the absence of advanced medical interventions, would the impact of infectious diseases on human society increase overtime?

Kinoshita Yoshikazu (pseudonym)

1 min readAug 18, 2023

Comments 4

Sorted by

New & upvoted

Linch

Some additional reasons in favor of this hypothesis:

greater degree of interconnectedness and travel
- compared to the past, a new zoonotic disease in Vietnam is much more likely to Brazil, and vice versa.
(disputed) factory farming increases both the absolute number of sick animals, and human-animal transmision, and factory farming appears to go up with time
(high uncertainty) empirical rate of epidemics seems to be going up with time
(possibly) climate change
lab accidents/escape and other artificial causes of novel pandemics

Some reasons against:

adaptive immunity, especially in youth. If young people are exposed to H5N1, SARS-CoV-2, etc, they a) are in many situations less directly affected by eg covid and b) can build long-lasting immune responses such that future exposure to them as adults will be less effective than on immunologically naive adults.
evolution of pathogens to be less lethal with time
- While this is by no means guaranteed, under some models there are tradeoffs between how lethal a pathogen is, and how likely they are to infect people. To the extent this is true, we might expect formerly lethal pathogens to become less lethal with time
  - This is hypothesized to have occurred with the Spanish flu and earlier (pre-COVID, pre-SARS) coronaviruses
social/policy responses to the threat of pandemics
- in the absence of advanced medical interventions, we might still have social/policy non-medical interventions to try to reduce the load of pandemics.
- for example, flying might become less common (more penalized), quarantines might become more common

On balance, I personally think it's more likely that we'll have increased rather than decreased probability of pandemics in the coming decades, especially in the absence of next-gen countermeasures. But I'm pretty uncertain overall, and I can imagine it flipping either way.

Kinoshita Yoshikazu (pseudonym)

I think the second reason "against" is probably the only true argument that my hypothesis is wrong.

The first reason still doesn't prevent the disease burden after covid/any new pathogen spilled into humans from being appreciably bigger than the disease burden before the event.

The third reason is of course about interventions, which can go...many ways.

I didn't raise it in my original question but I wondered if this hypothesis applied to non-human species, which would still be a pretty interesting problem since it might impose a limit to the propagation of any species (as it collects more different kinds of pathogens overtime and need to contend with them).

JoshuaBlake

One thing you're missing in this model is that they'd be selection pressure on humans to develop stronger natural immunity or ability to live with these pathogens.

It's also a weird counterfactual since it's plausible that technology enables infectious diseases (due to human density and connectivity) in the way that we experience them. It seems that pandemics may have been especially bad ~19th century when the world was quite connected but there was no modern medicine (germ theory, antibiotics, etc.).

Kinoshita Yoshikazu (pseudonym)

That is true! Maybe the disease burden increases when new pathogens are introduced but eventually reaches a balance.

But it doesn't seem to completely remove the effect from accumulating multiple pathogens in the community, a population with covid+flu (or any other combination of pathogens with no cross-immunity) in circulation and adapted to live with them will probably still have a higher disease burden than a population with just the flu in circulation and adapted with them.

Quite likely that the 19th century was worse than before due to increased population density and global connectivity, and I shudder to imagine what if AIDS became established in humans in the 19th century instead of the 20th.

Comments

Curated and popular this week

What would an animal-aligned AI be aligned to?

Aidan Kankyoku, Anima International·1w ago·Curated 5d ago·15m read

This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack. The goals of this post are to: 1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...

201

The first video from Giving What We Can's new channel is out now!

JustinPortela·6d ago·1m read

Hello! I'm Justin Portela. I got hired by GWWC to make YouTube videos after AI in Context did such a kickass job. My channel is using that same cinematic, high-production value beauty to talk about everything in the EA universe that isn't AI. ...

122

Let's taboo the V-word

lincolnq·1d ago·8m read

“How long have you been v*g*n?” This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers. But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...

Recent opportunities to take action

Linch

Some additional reasons in favor of this hypothesis:

greater degree of interconnectedness and travel
- compared to the past, a new zoonotic disease in Vietnam is much more likely to Brazil, and vice versa.
(disputed) factory farming increases both the absolute number of sick animals, and human-animal transmision, and factory farming appears to go up with time
(high uncertainty) empirical rate of epidemics seems to be going up with time
(possibly) climate change
lab accidents/escape and other artificial causes of novel pandemics

Some reasons against:

adaptive immunity, especially in youth. If young people are exposed to H5N1, SARS-CoV-2, etc, they a) are in many situations less directly affected by eg covid and b) can build long-lasting immune responses such that future exposure to them as adults will be less effective than on immunologically naive adults.
evolution of pathogens to be less lethal with time
- While this is by no means guaranteed, under some models there are tradeoffs between how lethal a pathogen is, and how likely they are to infect people. To the extent this is true, we might expect formerly lethal pathogens to become less lethal with time
  - This is hypothesized to have occurred with the Spanish flu and earlier (pre-COVID, pre-SARS) coronaviruses
social/policy responses to the threat of pandemics
- in the absence of advanced medical interventions, we might still have social/policy non-medical interventions to try to reduce the load of pandemics.
- for example, flying might become less common (more penalized), quarantines might become more common