[extropy-chat] Failure of low-fat diet

[Keith Henson]

At 11:53 AM 2/23/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>At 11:19 AM 2/23/2006, Russell Wallace wrote:

snip

> >Are you seriously suggesting that it might
> >have been just a coincidence, that some mysterious alternative force
> >made the diseases go away just when the vaccines would have eradicated them?
>
>"The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of
>Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century", by John and
>Sonja McKinlay, Milbank Quarterly, 55:405-428, 1977.
>
>It shows graphs of the mortality rates as a function of time.  There
>isn't much apparent effect at the time when famous vaccines were introduced.

It is fairly easy to see why such effects would be hard to see.  When 
introduced the population consisted of mostly those who had been infected 
with the diseases the vaccines protected against and were mostly immune as 
a result.

The effect of vaccination would be most apparent in the children who slowly 
take their place in the population.

Introducing a vaccine for a disease which outright killed 5% of those under 
(say) 5 (1%/year) would show an impressive drop in the absolute numbers who 
died from this cause, but it would hardly show up in statistics for the 
whole population.   If the under 5 population is 10% the whole population 
would show only a tenth of a percent mortality drop from a 100% effective 
vaccine.

I am not addressing the meat of this subject, only the math.

Keith