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.
The article referenced mentions of goitre in Switzerland from Victor Hugo in 1839, Mark Twain in 1880, a medical survey in 1883, and Roman authors like Vitrivius and Pliny the Elder. It also mentioned that the iodine idea had been going around for a hundred years before the activities of the heroes of our story.
Iodine had not been seen as a successful cure before because excess iodine causes a horrible condition. The key difference here was that Hunziker proposed regular use in minute quantities, and then Bayard tested the hypothesis with careful measurements and convincing evidence.
Swiss geology (retreat of the glaciers 10000 years ago) meant that the normal local products that would give a population iodine (milk and eggs) were themselves iodine-poor. A few parts of Switzerland which were not glaciated (i.e. Jura) did not have iodine deficient populations.
Other places in the world had different geology and this different levels of natural iodine.
Goethe wrote in 1779 about his travels to Switzerland: “Die scheußlichen Kröpfe haben mich ganz und gar üblen Humors gemacht (“The horrible goiters have given me a very bad sense of humour”). Definitely plenty of earlier historic evidence.
> 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
This was pre-internet and in remote areas where there is a distrust of central authority.
And there are loads of examples through history up till current day that show that blindly trusting authorities is naive. Heck, even in the article, some doctors were poisoning their patients with iodine. It is not far fetched that some people in these areas were informed of these problems. So a tiny amount kills us... and so you are saying any even tinier amount will save us. I'd be pretty skeptical too.
It seems that when presented well and with personally verifiable evidence, people were willing to accept.
I am really flabbergasted when people blindly accept in mass what authorities tell us.
The article mentions comments from the 19th century about the same subject.
I think, that Switzerland, and especially those remote mountain regions, stayed more isolated than similar regions in France or Austria well into the early 20th century, making the issue stand out more in comparison.
There was no uptick, CIDS was endemic to the alps as far back as roman times. Its consequences literally slipped into linguistic vernaculars (e.g. french as the insult "crétin des alpes", lit. "cretin from the alps", and "cretin" was the original term for CIDS-induced mental impairment).
> I am always flabbergasted when people question incredibly effective public health initiatives.
I think it comes from a generalised distrust of governments/big institutions. Which comes from hearing (often heavily distorted) stories about things like Tuskegee Syphilis, MKULTRA, CIA vaccinators in Afghanistan and Thalidomide.
"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."
It was. Cretinism was one of the manifestations of iodine deficiency. The trope of crétin des Alpes (lit. cretin from the Alps) existed for a reason. The manifestation was goitres and stunted development, with people who seemingly stopped growing up around 14. Pretty much the story’s subject. It was a public health problem before iodised salt.
> How come that the disease wasn't widespread earlier?
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.
It was widespread but has always been particularly worse in inland mountainous regions. To this day, efforts remain to eliminate iodine deficiency worldwide.
In Slovakia, another landlocked country with lack of natural iodine from rainfall or diet, dementia became part of the culture. 30% (!!!) of population suffered from dementia. Iodizing salt raised IQ by 10 point every 10~ years but the damage is irreparable…
