Figures released by the UN claim that the number of human beings alive on our planet at any one time crossed the magical figure of one billion in 1804. It has to be said however that this is no mean feat as there was time, albeit a very long time ago when the global population was hovering around one million. All the same, it is also worthy of note that we had to wait for another one hundred and twenty-three years before the global population added another billion people even if that meant a doubling of the population. Today, ninety-seven years later there are close to eight and a half billions of us swarming all over this planet which has expanded, at least figuratively to accommodate all of us, each one according to his or her station. Comfortingly however, there is yet a great deal of space to accommodate many more of us. World population increase has been nothing if not revolutionary over the last one hundred years. Without all the senseless global wars, low grade but frighteningly murderous conflicts in the way of Boko Haram and a couple of pandemics in the last hundred years, there certainly would have been many more of us. But that is another story all together.
Looking at human population figures a little more closely, the figure of 40% leaps out with considerable force because this is the figure of human beings who were born since the dawn of human occupation of the earth but could not live long enough to see their first birthday. This shows just how inhospitable our natural environment is, as surviving long enough to propagate the species is one huge obstacle course, the survival of which cannot be taken for granted. This is why it is only in the last two generations that all over the world, humans have become more relaxed about the survival of their children. This is also perhaps why we are now much more indulgent with our offspring than ever before in human history. A couple can now limit the number of their children to two or three, secure in the knowledge that but for wildly unforeseen circumstances, all of them would live long enough not only to have their own children but to be present at the respective funerals of their parents. It is thus reasonable and psychologically rewarding to invest a great deal of emotional and other forms of expenses on each child. In the days when only two or three of ten children were likely to survive childhood, it would have been foolish to lavish a great deal of care and attention or any particular care on some child who under normal circumstances was just passing through and was not likely to be around long enough for any lasting bonds to be formed. Better to regard them as transient tenants who were likely to simply drop out of the nest one day, never to return. This is why all over the world, children were the recipient of truly horrifying treatment at the hands of their own parents. In both Britain and the United States, in the closing years of the nineteenth century children needed the protection of special laws from the wanton cruelties, some of them quite extreme, from both their parents and unscrupulous industrialists who put children to work with dangerous machinery at an age when they should have been handling nothing more lethal than stuffed toys. It has to be said however that it was not only children who died long before their time. Many of their parents were only a little less vulnerable so that there were a large number of orphans for which nobody, not even the state was responsible. The adventures of Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit as narrated by Charles Dickens suggest that life was far from being a bed of roses for children who had the misfortune of having been born two centuries ago. Across the pond in the USA, Jack London in his book The Jungle, tells the story of a child immigrant who worked in the stockyards of Chicago. His main job was to fetch beer for his older co-workers throughout the day as they butchered an unending succession of cows, sheep or pigs. To pep himself up, or perhaps to assuage the many difficulties of his young life, the poor boy took little sips from each cup of beer he delivered. At the end of one fateful and very hot working day, with the smell of blood and guts swirling around his brain the boy had succumbed to the soporific effects of the alcohol he had ingested throughout the day and fell asleep in one corner of the work place. He was eaten up by ravenous giant rats overnight. No child deserves to be exposed to such danger in the name of earning a few pennies to augment the meagre wages of his parents who were only marginally less exploited than he was. It is sad that all over the economically challenged parts of the world including Nigeria stories like this have not yet been consigned to the dustbin of history. As one of my waggish friends who is now quite out of it all, would have said, we are still at the mouth of it.
From the point of view of child survival, we entered a brand new world about one hundred years ago when childhood mortality fell dramatically and in doing so changed the world fundamentally and forever, first in the rich nations and then slowly but surely practically all over the world even in places in the back of beyond like some of the barely accessible parts of Nigeria and other such countries where poverty rules. The one difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich took note of changing conditions and set a limit to their child bearing whereas the poor have continued to produce children in the imitation of a magician effortlessly pulling fluffy rabbits out of a top hat. This is why the population of Nigeria is increasing in the manner of a fully laden lorry running out of control, a towering danger to all and sundry. The population of Nigeria in 1918 was put at eighteen million of which no less than half a million died in the influenza pandemic of 1918/19. Today, there are an estimated two hundred and fifteen million of us, to quote one of the fewest numbers attributed to it. Thus, the population of Nigeria has been multiplied by twelve in a hundred years or just over three generations. The problem of dying children has now been replaced by that of swarms of children with a dodgy future.
Before the pioneering work of Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, mankind had no clue as to what was responsible for the illnesses which unchecked, claimed human lives apparently with careless abandon. Children with their immature immune system were especially vulnerable to microbial infections, an inordinate number of which were around to terminate the earthly existence of large numbers of children, cutting them down like ripe wheat in a field during harvest. Polio, chicken pox, small pox, diphtheria, whooping cough, diarrhoea, malaria and many other swift killers competed among themselves as to which of them could do the most damage within any environment that could be mentioned. Given the terribly poor nutritional status of most people, it is a wonder that any of them survived long enough to have children.
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One thing that is clear from human history is that until recently, in the last hundred years of the 300,000 year existence of the human race has man been able to stand up the zillions of microbes with which we share this planet. The irony of this situation is that without the activities of these microbes billions of which live within our body, the earth as we know it will collapse and die in next to no time. Actually, of all the many million species of these organisms whose primary function is to regenerate the earth, only a few of them have the intention or the capacity to harm their human neighbours and hosts. But the few which have the potential to harm us can kill us within a few days. Two of such organisms were responsible for small pox and tuberculosis which killed at will over the last twelve centuries or so. For most of that time, mankind had no answer to their infestation. For example, small pox is reputed to have killed 400 million people in the last century even though the disease was eradicated twenty years before the end of that century. As for tuberculosis, there was no cure for it until the early fifties when it was found that the newly discovered streptomycin had excellent activity against the organism responsible for this infection. D. H. Lawrence died of it and although George Orwell was treated with streptomycin, he reacted so violently to the drug that it had to be withdrawn from treatment with it and so, the man died, another artistic victim of what the Europeans called the white death. Until the fifties therefore, a diagnosis of tuberculosis was a death sentence waiting to be executed. Today, tuberculosis is still killing in excess of a million people every year but we now have many effective drugs with which we can force a stay of the execution of the death sentence which tuberculosis was only sixty years ago.
Man has battled against sickness and death ever since he acquired the power of critical thinking and acute observation. He was even able to assemble an impressive armamentum of drugs, most of them plant derived. In spite of these herbal drugs however, man continued to be knocked over by illness like pins in a bowling alley. Shamans, sangomas, babalawos, spiritual healers as well as con men of every description have stepped up to the plate to work their magic against illness and death of the sudden variety but when we look at available figures, we can only come to the conclusion that unfortunately, they were all uniformly unsuccessful. Man continued to die sometimes at an alarming rate throughout the period of recorded history. It was not until scientists, those hard headed men and women began to tackle microorganisms with keen and tested scientific methods that we began to make any headway against the diseases which shortened the life expectancy of human beings. Within the last hundred and twenty years global life expectancy has more than doubled from thirty-two years to seventy-one and in some parts of the world it is significantly in excess of eighty years. How this has been achieved is worthy of comment.
