Survival Of The Sickest Summary

1.The “big” question that the book will attempt to answer is “Why would evolution- which is supple go weed out harmful traits and promote helpful ones- allow this gene (hemochromatosis) to persist?”

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

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

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.

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.

Sharon Moalem discusses is hemochromatosis. Hemochromatosis is a disorder that disrupts iron metabolization, by absorbing excess iron instead of passing it through the body, causing iron to build up in the organs, especially the liver, heart and pancreas. The symptoms are joint pain, fatigue, and weakness. It was first described by Armand Trousseau in 1865, but is thought to have originated with the Vikings and spread throughout Northern and Western Europe. The genetic variant for hemochromatosis is very common among people of Western European descent, but only one in two hundred of those people have the disease with all of the assorted symptoms. Hemochromatosis can be diagnosed through blood and genetic tests, and it can be treated through the ancient practice of phlebotomy, or bloodletting. This lowers the amount of iron in the blood, and in the body, to safe levels. But although it is easily treatable, if left unchecked, hemochromatosis can lead to serious complications. As Dr. Moalem says, “Unchecked, hemochromatosis can lead to liver failure, heart failure, diabetes, arthritis, infertility, psychiatric disorders, and even cancer. Unchecked, hemochromatosis will lead to death.” Thus, before the days of genetic and blood testing, hemochromatosis was a very dangerous disease, and often caused death in middle age. It is here that Dr. Moalem raises the question: if hemochromatosis was so deadly, why was it passed down for so many generations? Unless it provided our ancestors with an advantage, such a damaging disease would not have remained in their gene

In the book, “Survival of the Sickest”, Sharon Moalem forms the basis of how vaccine originated to become a way of combatting the most dangerous diseases in the world. It began with a discovery from a man named Edward Jenner, a doctor from Gloucestershire county in England, where he began to understand a strange pattern when people who were immune to cowpox were struggling with smallpox and vice-versa. He started to test his findings through a small experiment where he injected cow pox into a group of young children and he was surprised to see that their bodies built immunity towards smallpox and supported his findings on the bizarre immunity of people towards either the smallpox or the cowpox but not to both. The rest of the chapter explains complex concepts

Health care has been a debatable topic for many years now. More than half of Americas are without health coverage. On the other side the world places like Germany and Japan required that everyone has insurance. In the videos, Sick Around the World and Sick Around America, Frontline examines the health care system in the United States and parts of the world such as, England, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland, for some responses about health care.

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.

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

While watching the film “Sick around the World,” I learned that one of the first statements made on the video was extremely true. The statement made was, “other countries do much better than the U.S but spend a lot less money.” There were numerous innovations that impressed me from several different countries. The countries with innovations that stuck out the most were Germany, Japan, and Taiwan.

A doctorate holder in human physiology, neurogenetics and evolutionary medicine, Dr.Sharon Moalem makes connections between modern day diseases and how they were necessary for the survival of our ancestors. In his book Survival of the Sickest, Moalem makes many claims, but they are all hypotheses. One of Moalem’s firsts claims is that hemochromatosis, a fairly rare disease today unless one is of Western European descent, is a disease that can cause many complications within the human body due to an iron excess. Moalem claims that hemochromatosis is still in the gene pool and is very common to people of European descent because of the bubonic plague. The plague, a very fatal disease that reared its head in Europe during the 14th century is

Hemochromatosis is the over loading of Iron in the body which lead to damage to organs. Although Iron is thought to help bacteria grow more rapidly with this particular illness it blocks bacteria from growing due to iron-deficient macrophages. Macrophages are white blood cells that act as a blockage for bacteria and can help kill the bacteria off instead of feeding it since with done not have the iron the bacteria needs to thrive. The example used in the book is the Bubonic plague, it is thought that the people had this block were less susceptible to the plague and that was the majority of the people that survived. This is ultimately what has been allowing the mutation to live on in the gene

The average human lifestyle has drastically improved over the past several years. Advances in medicine and technology have directly led to an irrevocable increase in both the quality of living, as well as the length of average lifetimes. Prior to this modern revolution of medical applications, humans who lived during the middle ages were stricken with plagues, disease, injuries, and other difficulties with health that greatly wreaked havoc on mortality rates. Since remaining in a state of adequate health is so fundamental to human satisfaction and progression, individuals have historically centered the majority of their existence on ensuring that the underlying requirements necessary for life were being