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Ars Technica reports on a paper in PNAS that suggests the use of fire might have paved the way for Tuberculosis to become the killer it has been over our entire history.
How could fire influence transmission? The authors suggest that it enabled new contexts for human social interactions and thus transmission. Fires provided social focal points for early humans, particularly when food was being prepared or consumed or after daylight hours. The maintenance of a fire would have required increased cooperation and social interaction, all of which increased the probability of infectious disease transmission.
Additionally, the inhalation of smoke from fires, particularly in enclosed or indoor spaces, likely made the pulmonary tissues of early humans especially sensitive to infection. In support of this idea, the authors cite modern epidemiological evidence, which indicates that exposure to smoke from tobacco increases the risk of TB. They suggest that when early humans were tending fires, it was likely under very low ventilation conditions, which would have a similar effect to smoking on pulmonary tissues.
Living in close quarters in scarce shelters was probably bad enough. Adding smoke to irritate the lungs probably left everyone with a cough and a sore throat.
I've been in some of the places where TB stubbornly remained problematic well into the 70s. The Alaskan bush typically had poorly ventilated log cabins, with wood heating and lots of smoke. There is a limit to how much fresh air you want to let in when its 40 below for months on end.
This is a disease that preceded the white man, and history shows it was a problem before Seward bought the place from the Russians. The fight against Tuberculosis in Alaska was a long battle and the disease was a major problem into the early 1970s. In Southeast Alaska, the death rate from tuberculosis in 1932 was 1,302 per 100,000. since then, the rate Alaska Natives (the most impacted group) has declined from 653 per 100,000 in 1950 to merely three times the national average today. (9.2/100,000).
I suppose most of this is due to better medicine and vaccines. But at least some of has to do with modern housing and better heating systems.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday August 03 2016, @04:49PM
A key to successful science to focus on questions that can actually be answered
Just because there isn't data now, doesn't mean that will remain the case. For example, anthropologists can look for more evidence of TB in skeletal remains which would be useful to determine both frequency and characteristics of TB infections. They might even be able to extract ancient DNA or protein from TB bacteria (and not just from victims which died of TB) which in turn might be used to estimate how long TB has been in human genus populations.