Centre for "Independent" Studies man says rate of disablement going up despite changes in work that should lower it. He smells rat.

I disagree.

If people were exposed to, say, asbestos between, say, 40 & 10 years ago, the rate of asbestos-related diseases will still be rising for another decade or two as the diseases may take that more than two decades to develop. This is despite the amount of exposure to asbestos declining sharply in the last, say 10 years.

Similar 'tails' are happening with many other now-banned substances and work practices which have been improved over time, but whose working-out through damaged people will take some while yet.

Similarly, the accumulated damage to people's health will usually show up as they grow older. Their ability to either recover from ongoing wear & tear, or the inherent strength of youth which masked the results of earlier injuries both decline. It's not just developing the diseases of age. I don't know that his easy dismissal of this effect of aging is fully acceptable

Further examples:
Footballers who have done awful things to their joints & muscles from, say, age 15 to 30, start to seize up badly with osteoarthritis, etc, in their forties & beyond, even if they haven't played or done heavy exercise for 10 or more years.
Noticed how you can't stay up drinking & dancing 'til late, then still do a decent day's work after a handful of headache pills & ingesting some bracing nutritive 'cure' these days? Even if the drinking & dancing & lateness aren't as much as they used to be?
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Very many environmental problems show the same characteristics. The consequences of what we have done & are doing now will echo down the years far beyond a single human lifetime.

We are living now with things people did (in religion, politics, society, technology) sometimes hundreds of years ago, and often forget or don't recognise it. The Millennium fuss didn't bring this out as much as I'd hoped. At least they've been discussing the effect of WW I on Iraq recently. Then there's the "Passion" debates ('Compass' & SBS had some good programs on how early Christianity developed recently, but how many watched compared to that?).

Hooray for ABC radio too, with the RN history programs & James Valentine's weekly discussion.

Alas, not so many of the TV history documentaries or dramas make the connexion between what happened then & how things are now. For instance, no epilogue on the religious conflict still bubbling in Ireland or the other four hundred-odd years of consequences of Henry VIII's reforms in the recent brief TV treatment of his life.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/06/2004 05:55:00 pm