and patterns of inheritance, rather than family blood. They think about infectious disease in terms of
microbes and pathogenicity, rather than speaking of bad humors. They have identified vitamins and
other nutrients that are abundant in some foodstuff s and lacking in other that are essential for
optimal immune function. Without the benefit of such modern formulations, Dr. Trudeau, by a
disciplined application of scientific curiosity and careful, clever methodology, shed light on each of
these concerns, light that helped to illuminate the minds of scientists who came after. Still, a look at
his original paper leaves us wondering, were the rabbits genetically identical? Probably not! Why?
Were they all of the same sex and age? Couldn’t he have given the animals kept on short rations just a
smaller amount of the same varieties of food available to the animals fed abundantly—after all, there
might be some important nutrient missing in potatoes. In light of the title of the paper, why not
measure bacterial numbers in the rabbits on post mortem rather than just survival time? (In a
subsequent paper, he did exactly that.) Once you start critiquing an experiment from 100 years ago,
or 10 years ago, or sometimes even last year, it’s hard to stop. Can you think of anything else you
would have changed about the Rabbit Island Experiment?
I would have changed the environment and the length of the post inoculation follow up to give a more accurate and extended result report.
9. Suppose you were the Mayor of New York City in the 1890s/early 1900s and were convinced by Dr.
Trudeau’s experiments that in your city a transmissible bacterium was causing tuberculosis and that
poor living conditions and inadequate diet were adversely affecting the ability of hundreds of people
to fight the infection. What sort of public policies might you try to enact in order to combat the public
health menace? What obstacles might you encounter?
The biggest thing that I would push for is the improvement and the availability of homes that improve
the living conditions of those who were living in the poor conditions. The biggest obstacle that I can see I
would have to face would be two things the first being the finances and the second thing being the
space. The place is already crowded and money is never easy to access for such big projects however the
amount of lives saved and danger it would decrease would be a great motivator for those funding the
project.
Part II – Tuberculosis in Social Context
1. The curve shown in Figure 2 has three parts, from 1700–1800, 1800 to approx. 1955, and 1955 to
approximately 1985. The data used to produce the curve are from Western Europe, but a similar one
could be expected for the United States. Write a sentence telling why each part of the curve looks the
way it does. In looking just at this graph, what would you predict about the death rate from TB in 2000
and 2005?
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