The number one cause of death in America — heart disease — is about to enter its peak season. Cold winter weather means constricting blood vessels, which raises blood pressure and worsens heart problems, contributing to a yearly spike in heart-related deaths
The number one cause of death in America — heart disease — is about to enter its peak season. Cold winter weather means constricting blood vessels, which raises blood pressure and worsens heart problems, contributing to a yearly spike in heart-related deaths.
But heart disease isn’t just a problem for winter — it’s a year-round public health crisis that’s been raging since the 1930s, despite awareness, societal changes and medical advancements.
Thanks to modern medicine and public health initiatives, we have made progress against some diseases in that time.
“We’re moving away from diseases like typhoid and malaria,” Daniel Sledge, Ph.D., an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas Arlington, told weather.com. “The 1940s were right around the tipping point where we moved from traditional acute disease to chronic problems like heart disease and cancer that were just emerging.”
We also know so much more about the health risks of smoking, air pollution and pesticides, leading to tighter regulations and vast public-health improvements.
“Smoking rates have gone down substantially since the 1960s following the surgeon generals report,” said Dr. Sledge.
Meanwhile, treatable and preventable causes of death — like tuberculosis, typhoid fever and premature birth — have been replaced by causes of death that result from living longer, like Alzheimer’s disease.
“Part of the reason [chronic diseases are more common] is that people just live longer,” said Dr. Sledge. “They are no longer dying as children and living into their 70s, 80s and 90s. So you get to the point where people are dying more of heart disease and cancer.”
Some of the things that seem obvious to us now — such as a smoking ban in hospitals — were ignored until fairly recently. “In hospitals, up until the 1980s and 1990s, people were allowed to smoke,” added Dr. Sledge. “It’s a fairly recent innovation that you don’t have that in hospital rooms.”
Look through the slideshow above to see what other health problems were common — or completely unknown — in the 1940s.
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