Survival Of The Sickest Analysis

In chapter one it talks about how hemachromatosis is a hereditary disease and it’s the most common genetic disease for people of European descent, in which the body can't register that it has enough iron. So it keeps absorbing as much of it as possible, and this can have very, serious side effects (including death). Iron is very important for bacteria, cancer, and other things to grow. The way this disease is most easily treated is blood letting. Looks like all those crazy blood-letting, leech-sticking doctors weren't mistreating everyone. What is the author's argument for why this disease stuck around? To really simplify things: during the black plague in Europe, people with more iron in their system were more likely

Inarguably the greatest asset of all living organisms (including humans), life is a matter of extreme complexity that possesses both wondrous and hindering aspects to it. Such a concept is captured within “Survival of the Sickest,” in which Dr. Moalem, alongside Jonathan Prince, accompany us on an evolutionary journey to appreciate our longevity and grasp humanity’s relationship with various diseases. Of these, I specifically selected for diabetes, favism, or G6PD deficiency, and hemochromatosis. One may ask, “Why?” Well, the former innately sparked much interest within me due to the fact that my diabetic grandmother of 70 recently passed away, while the latter two forced me to embrace the idea that too much or too little of a helpful substance

There are millions of people living in the world today, and along with these millions of people have come the struggles and influences that they had to overcome as the years passed. They have learned to overcome or cope with certain circumstance that are thrown their way. One of the main things that these individuals had to learn to overcome was diseases. Back then millions of people died from different disease daily because they didn’t have the right medicine or medicine at all. As time, has passed, there have been thousands of

People of the Old World had domesticated pigs, horses, sheep, and cattle(1), which had acted as pathogens to infect the Europeans with diseases. In addition, diseases were constantly circulated with centuries of war, exploration, and city building. During the process of natural selection, disease-intolerant

As the concentration of hemoglobin in the Red Blood Cells falls below normal, the total Red Blood Cell count consequently decreases. Therefore, oxygen cannot be adequately carried. (http://www.mayohealth.org/mayo/pted/htm/iron.htm).

Hemochromatosis is a genetic disease in which there is too much iron that builds up in your body, this is referred to as an iron overload. Iron is an essential nutrient found in many foods but can be toxic to our bodies if we have to much. “Normally, humans absorb about 8-10% of the iron found in foods that they eat.” People with Hemochromatosis can absorb up to four times more iron than a normal human being. Since our bodies have no natural way to get rid of the extra iron, it gets stored in your body tissue including the liver, heart, pancreas and many other areas of our body can also be infected by this iron overload.

People may not know they have hemochromatosis since in the early stages they may not have any symptoms. In this stage, the only way the disorder can be detected is through routine blood tests and the doctor noticing elevated iron levels in the blood. Usually, the first and most common symptoms of hemochromatosis is joint pain and fatigue, but these are symptoms which occur in several other diseases and disorders, so the diagnosis is frequently held up or even overlooked. “Pain in the knuckles of the pointer and middle finger, collectively called ‘The Iron Fist,’ is the only sign or symptom specific to hemochromatosis. However, not everyone with HHC experiences the Iron Fist” (“WHAT IS HEMOCHROMATOSIS?” n.d.).

The first disease Moalem discusses, hemochromatosis, is a hereditary disorder that he himself lives with. It causes excess iron buildup throughout the body, damaging “the joints, the major organs, and overall body chemistry” (p. 13). Hemochromatosis can lead to “liver failure, heart failure, diabetes, arthritis, infertility, psychiatric disorders[, ...] cancer” (p. 13) and, in the end, death. Although it is more common in some communities than others, today the low-penetrance disease only manifests in 1 in 200 people.

Survival of the Sickest, written by author Dr. Sharon Moalem, is a book discussing why evolution has not allowed for the destruction of certain diseases. He states that these deadly diseases, such as Anemia, Hemochromatosis, and High Cholesterol, are in fact tools that evolution used to help the human race survive. He explains how these diseases helped fight against more dangerous and life threatening sicknesses such as, Malaria, the Bubonic Plague, and Vitamin D deficiency related illnesses. The main idea of this book is a simple one. Evolution did not necessarily favor adaptations that made us better. Instead, it favored adaptations that helped us survive. Even if these adaptations would end up killing us in the long run.

This class also helped me finally begin to understand Diabetes, and that it was a metabolic disorder that affects the Endocrine system by not producing enough insulin, producing no insulin, or causing cells that do not respond properly to insulin produced by the pancreas (Pakistan & Gulf Economist, 2011); and to distinguish between the different types of diabetes. This once again set the foundation for me to begin to understand exactly what occurred in my grandfather’s situation. Understanding what I now know, as I write this paper, I realize that it was in this class where I began to put together that we are not necessarily sentenced to a life of disease simply because we have a familial predisposition to it (Cirino & Ho, 2013). Heredity can predispose us to things such as diabetes, high cholesterol, and cardiovascular

Hemochromatosis, also called iron overload, is a disease when the body absorbs too much iron from the food we eat and most often affects the liver, heart, pancreas, and skin. It is usually caused by genes in the body that mutate keeping them from working. Some signs and symptoms of this disease are weakness, joint pain, low libido, and/or if the disease has progressed to far diabetes or heart failure. Hemochromatosis is one of the more difficult diseases to diagnose because many symptoms are nonspecific and usually many people don’t show as many symptoms except elevated iron levels in their blood. Most will be treated with blood transfusions until the normal level of iron is reached. If diagnosed early the prognosis is excellent with possible checkups or phlebotomies.

Diseases have been categorized as under a derogatory and lamentable category. However, Dr.Sharon Moalem and Jonathan Prince approach diseases from a different view in their scientific book Survival of the Sickest . They discuss that if diseases weren 't helpful, shouldn 't they have been eliminated through natural selection or shouldn 't humans have developed resistance to them through the use of evolution? Moalem and Prince answer the questions by going back in time and analyzing the uses of diseases, and come across surprises that may help humans in the future as they may have in the past. Though Moalem and Prince discussed many diseases in their book Survival of the Sickest, three diseases really stood out.

Although populations in ancient societies suffered attacks, invasions, starvation, and persecution, there was a more efficient killer that exterminated countless people. The most dreaded killers in the ancient world were disease, infections and epidemics. In many major wars the main peril was not gunfire, nor assault, but the easily communicable diseases that rapidly wiped out whole divisions of closely quartered soldiers. Until the time of Hippocrates, in the struggle between life and death, it was, more often than not, death that prevailed when a malady was involved. In the modern world, although illness is still a concern, advances in thought and technique have led to the highest birth rates in recorded history. No longer is a fever a

Take hemochromatosis, a hereditary condition that causes iron to accumulate in a person's body. A person having hemochromatosis

Survival of the Sickest is a fascinating book that explores why we need disease and how different diseases have evolved from the beginning of time. Author, Dr. Sharon Moalem goes beyond the surface and answers many questions about evolution and disease for example, “Was diabetes evolution’s response to the last Ice Age?” and many others. Dr. Moalem shares how many of the diseases that we call harmful today have actually proven to be beneficial to survival for our ancestors. This book shows how every single thing that our ancestors have done in the past from the environment they lived in to the food they ate can be seen in our genetic code. Survival of the Sickest does not solely focus on the history of disease and evolution, it shows the reader