I'm always impressed with all these doctors that would question the approach, try new protocols, and end up by finding a cure
I suspect that one of the issues was that most/all food used to be sourced locally, especially eggs and milk, which are good sources of iodine, with seafood probably mostly absent from the Swiss diet.
Edit: apparently nowadays, and taking animal feed into account, Switzerland imports about 50% of its food.
"Iodine-131 (usually as iodide) is a component of nuclear fallout, and is particularly dangerous owing to the thyroid gland's propensity to concentrate ingested iodine and retain it for periods longer than this isotope's radiological half-life of eight days. For this reason, people at risk of exposure to environmental radioactive iodine (iodine-131) in fallout may be instructed to take non-radioactive potassium iodide tablets... Ingestion of [a] large dose of non-radioactive iodine minimises the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland."
https://www.klartext-nahrungsergaenzung.de/wissen/lebensmitt...
There is no scientifically sound reason against it.
My main issue with normal salt is the anti-caking ingredient needed to not have it stick together, in general not needed with sea salt and a real grinder.
We just don’t think about it because we’ve defeated it completely by putting iodine in the most popular spice, and also people in the past were afflicted by all sorts of horrible illnesses. It doesn’t stand out from the noise of the past being generally a mess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodized_salt#In_public_health_...
> Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.[1][2] According to public health experts, iodisation of salt may be the world's simplest and most cost-effective measure available to improve health, only costing US$0.05 per person per year
"The interests of people in the thyroid gland have always been immense because of the widespread prevalence of its diseases. Therefore the earliest references to the gland date back to 1st century AD. The Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Greek and Byzantine medicines are especially rich in their knowledge on the subject."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_iodine_deficiency...
The article makes reference to the Madonna on the Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece having an obvious goiter. That was produced in the late 15th to early 16th century. That’s evidence from the article that the problem was so common then that it was depicted in sacred art.
Maps with goiter prevalence can be found on the WHO's website: https://www.who.int/teams/nutrition-and-food-safety/database...
With all our popular narratives about the inevitability of scientific progress, it's always refreshing (from a historical point of view) and important (from a personal, ethical perspective) to remember that there's no guarantee that chronologically later developments will necessarily be improvements on earlier conclusions.
It brings to mind our current replication crises in science.
And even if in this case the initial solution was correct, it was still observing a correlation, as they had no clue why lemons do the job.
My conclusion based on the article is that just experimenting is not enough, you also need to develop and test a complex understanding of the system. We probably don't cherish enough as a society, that some of us (as in: trained researchers, etc.) have a mindset that expects both replication and understanding, even if being humans we don't always reach this ideal.
Basically, it's easy to think we understand something when we have a solution to it, but the two should not be automatically conflated.
Apparently Michigan helped normalize the ionization of salt in the US: https://www.michiganradio.org/show/stateside/2022-05-12/once...
You now have people that refuse to vaccinate their children against measles, COVID vaccine hesitancy is a widespread phenomenon with some people resorting to heresay remedies like horse dewormers instead, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is running for US president and polling with double digit numbers.
Health-related insights are particularly susceptible to targeted misinformation. And in an era of social media, this can quickly become a majority opinion.
They aren’t the anti science luddites your comment paints them as. They are (rightly) skeptical of “the science” which often isn’t very scientific at all.
As we’ve seen, the medical science community is heavily motivated by profit and prestige, but unfortunately not always truth.
New discoveries in that field are often revealed to be bullshit. They deserve skepticism, not blind compliance.
Mass vaccination started in the late 50s and especially early 60s (with Sabin’s oral vaccine).
Millennials start in 1981, so they would / could well have known affected adults.
It is hard to understand for me how people can intentionally increase risks of deadly diseases for their children.
I had some elderly neighbors with this condition and I think they lived long enough (1990 maybe?) that my two next younger brothers might have visited them too. (Why I don't know: they were not relatives or anything, my mom and aunt just used to visit them to be nice to them, so I suspect when I started school they might have taken my place.)
I’ve always wondered if the iodine in the air is part of the allure of the seaside.
Coastal areas of course have produced a huge number of successful countries. Most of that must be the trade and logistics advantages. I wonder if getting the iodine right out of the air was another hidden major advantage though.
There are also inland health resorts where they build huge salt evaporation walls so that people don't have to drive all the way to the sea to breath sea air- for example in Ciechocinek. And it's not modern technology - they have been built in early 19th century already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciechocinek_graduation_towers
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciechocinek#/media/Plik:Teznie...
That's exactly where it afflicted people in europe as well, mountainous regions tend to be inlands, and from their remoteness don't have the opportunity for incidental iodine through trade, so they worsen the odds, but historically distance from the sea (and thus lack of sea products) has absolutely been the primary issue. CIDS was also endemic to the english midlands for instance.
> I’ve always wondered if the iodine in the air is part of the allure of the seaside.
No, intake from air is considered insignificant.
But, intake from air is how the soil & plants get it, over long time scales…
It’s always possible that a simple indirect selection is at play, e.g. people who simply love the sea breeze (for no particular reason) are more successful because they get enough iodine. Then, the next generation is more likely to love the sea breeze.
Iodine deficiency is ONE cause of goiter, but not the only one.
https://www.healthline.com/health/hypothryroidism/hashimotos...
Since the article from OP is relatively short on images, the following are links to more images from the german article, with captions translated into english. Warning: images contain depictions of the medical condition discussed in the article. YMMV, but i don't consider them 'gross' or NSFW.
Image 1: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/EzdPT4pM4HAAzsQiwi_L2d.jpg Caption: Woman with goitre in Frienisberg, 1921.
Image 2: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/5PhByWEba4W8L0W1EnHXiE.jpg Caption: Woman with cretinism, 1928. (Today the word has a derogatory connotation, but primarily describes an illness of great cruelty).
Image 3: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/Bu0SX8WY4gK8jMZgebpyss.jpg Caption: Six women with cretinism, ca. 1920.
Image 4: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/8qBQEgsuqq-BMdsEAPN63U.jpg Caption: Found the solution to Switzerland's original curse: Heinrich Hunziker from Adliswil ZH, drawn by Marianne Zumbrunn in 1977.
Image 5: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/7tdlChuPq-3AIeFiSvh5U1.jpg Caption: Experiments with the snow shovel: the Valais country doctor Otto Bayard, 1937.
Image 6: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/5JGFFaXN48BA4xOsHXf0Zu.jpg Caption: Sun-tanned outdoorsman: the Herisau general practitioner and later chief physician Hans Eggenberger, undated.
[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wie-drei-heldenhafte-aerzte-die... or https://archive.is/rHzSV
edit: formatting, removed german caption texts
A fascinating story overall and a reminder of just one of a number of everyday sicknesses we (as a society) have been able to overcome through science and understanding, despite the occasional step backwards.
They work with politicians and industry in a very targetted way to increase the use of iodised salt in food production where it is most needed in the world. They don't directly fund any of the activities, but create the relationships, conditions and understanding for it to happen - meaning they are an extremely effective charity, creating population scale change with very modest funding.
They also do lots of work to try to map the global picture of iodine intake from the very varied data available. Some of the results might surprise you - https://ign.org/scorecard/
Changing the ratio of T3/T4 does cause a change in TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) but that's IMHO simply a signal that the iodine is getting used, so please send us more.
There are other tissues in the body that need iodine, as evidenced by the sodium-iodine symporter present on those cells, so to set the recommended daily iodine intake based solely on what the thyroid can use is IMHO a huge mistake.
Some things with interesting iodine research: skin cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, asthma, polycystic ovaries, fibrocystic breast disease, other cancers. But yeah, it cures goiter...
Supplementation with T3 yields a rapid correction in bradycardia and hypothermia caused by hypothyroidism. We treat with T4 because it has a longer physiological halflife and thus yields more consistent serum levels; but the evidence is incredibly clear that it's T3 which is having an effect, not T4.
When I search for breast cancer and iodine, I find links that suggest iodine may help prevent that disease - and Japan’s low rate of the condition is potentially related to high consumption of iodine.
Are you saying that all those conditions are due to excess iodine?
I never really got it until reading this article. But I've always made sure to have some iodized salt as I cook just to make sure we don't end up deficient, understanding that there was some easily avoided consequences at basically no cost.
'But as much as the country is agreeable in its wildness, as much are the inhabitants savage, and deformed, and monstrous in their appearance. Very many of them have ugly swelled throats; idiots and deaf people swarm in every village; and the general aspect of the people is the most shocking I ever saw.' [1]
That's why some traditional costumes in that region include a so called "Kropfband" (goitre bound). [2]
It's fascinating how much one's place of birth used to influence a life and medical biography and in many countries still does.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42843/42843-h/42843-h.htm
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/way-to-g...
https://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc5314/Freed...
Actual science looks nothing like the shoddy paper churning that we see in much of econ and social science using questionable and assumption-heavy casual inference methods.
The article is about how people with a fear of iodine overdose resisted the idea of adding it to salt on first place.
I spent my childhood in Brazil, a country where there are a good amount of natural iodine. Yet the government decided to ignore the risks, seemly well known for more than a century, and jack up the iodine in the salt to levels beyond what any international standard recommend or tested. And now I hypothyroidism caused by iodine overdose.
Peddling nonsense against better knowledge that causes this amount of suffering deserves ridicule in posterity. We shouldn't just celebrate those who do great things for humanity, but also "anti-celebrate" those who do great harm.
Otherwise polio, measles and the like are still as dangerous as they ever were and are ready to make their big return if vaccination rates drop too much. I'm certain even small pox is lurking somewhere out there.
It seems like, unfortunately, humanities book of learned lessons gets reprinted in pain and suffering once in a while.
Very unfair that this is still happening on a site with so many smart people on it.
https://www.mpi.govt.nz/food-safety-home/nutrients-added-foo...
It's a shame because the remaining 98% could get a lot of benefit and (setting aside the above) iodine is supposed to be the least toxic pure element. In the past Lugol's iodine was used as an antiseptic to put on cuts so I guess a fair amount got absorbed that way.
> in 1921, in the city of Bern, 94 per cent of schoolchildren had some swelling of the neck and almost 70 per cent had a goitre.
Gosh - it's surprising that years after discovering relativity and the like they were still figuring that out. (Einstein lived in Bern from 1903 to 1905 and developed his Theory of Relativity there).
As is usually the case with numbers like this from the past, this is a mean value, not a median value, that is massively skewed downwards by having upwards of 50% child mortality by age 4.
A typical Swiss person in 1875 who had already turned 30 could be expected to live to be 70.
Here's an article talking about this phenomenon [0]. They term it "adult modal age at death", i.e. at what age do people tend to die once they have survived childhood? In Sweden, in 1875 an adult woman could be expected to live to be 72, and an adult man to be 69. But the average life expectancy in Sweden in 1875 was only 44.
Per the same article, the modal age at death for adults in Switzerland in 1875 was 70 for both men and women.
[0] https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos...
As well as in the lowlands, far enough away from the sea to not have easy access to produces or sea salt through trade. It used to be common in the english midlands and the US midwest (as well as the appalachia and rockies).
Salt started being iodized only around 15 or so years back, IIRC.
https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2017-03-27/ty-art...
https://ijhpr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13584-020-...
although the rock salts of the world don't seem to be iodized iirc.
Captain Haddock, from Tin Tin used to call people 'crétin des Alpes'.
probably has more to do with 1515 (Marignano) and 1815 (Congress of Vienna, which secured Switzerland as an independent state, while enforcing neutrality).
Does anyone have an idea of how much potassium iodide they might have, if any?
And after reading it whole I must say. Fuck you Bircher.
For many, the meaning has been lost, and it became a generic term to designate an idiot. Despite having heard and even used the expression many times, I think the popular character "Captain Haddock" and his expletives from the "Tintin" comics made it popular. Yet, I only came to the true meaning very recently.
