Commentary: Missed Opportunities

Abstract

During the course of economic development, populations have become increasingly urban and geographically mobile. Cities created a new ecology for disease, and colonization brought unfamiliar diseases to colonizers and colonized alike. Urban death rates were usually very much higher than rural ones, and mortality rates from infections were often catastrophically high when new diseases were first introduced to populations. That economic development led to increased rates of urbanization may explain why economic growth rates were sometimes positively correlated with mortality. 11 However, there have also been processes of biological adaptation to the new risks. With new (as distinct from endemic) diseases, people lack the benefit of immunity acquired in early childhood, and selective process have not yet taken their toll of the most genetically susceptible sections of the population. After citing evidence that there were important genetic differences in susceptibility to tuberculosis, Burnett and White 12 gave examples of populations such as American Indians and Mauritians amongst whom it took—largely unaided by economic growth—around a 100 years for mortality rates from TB to fall from initially very high rates to rates as low as Europeans living in similar circumstances. These changes reflect some combination of the benefits of immunity acquired in early life to disease which have become endemic, and a process of genetic selection. Diseases in which there are both genetic differences in resistance, and high death rates before people reach reproductive ages, will tend to remove the most vulnerable sections of the population from the gene pool. Although McKeown and Lowe 3 thought economic growth was