It defeated Napoleon’s army; if Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were historically accurate, it would feature less cannon fire and more munching arthropods. The deceased ranged in age from younger than 1 year to 85 years, with an average age of 46 years (median 50 years); 70% were male. Houseflies are irritating today, but they used to be major vectors of deadly diarrheal disease. Laura Helmuth Laura Helmuth is the health, science, and environment editor at the Washington Post. From 2012–2016, she was Slate’s science and health editor. Follow her on Twitter. A round of applause, please, for some of the oddball reasons, in no particular order, why people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before. But the world is full of underappreciated people, innovations, and ideas that also save lives. Laura (that’s me) had scarlet fever when she was 2, which was once a leading cause of death among children but is now easily treatable with antibiotics. That’s the no-nonsense name of one of the most important publications most people have never heard of. Photo by Robert Riger/Getty Images 
 
 Lifespan has doubled in the United States in the past 150 years. The disease was common in the Southeast, spread when people walked barefoot across ground that was contaminated with feces of people who were already infected. Within the United States, better transportation in the 1800s brought wave after wave of disease outbreaks to new cities and the interior. Urbanization brought people into ideal proximity from a germ’s point of view, as did factory work. What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Anopheles mosquitoes had always flourished in the damp lowlands around streams and melting snow, and when settlers came, some of them carried Plasmodium parasites that the mosquitoes spread widely. (During a particularly awful plague in Europe, James Riley points out in Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History, the average life expectancy could temporarily drop by five years.) This should be an obvious lifesaver, right up there with hand-washing and proper nutrition. Some historians attribute one-half of the overall reduction in mortality, two-thirds of the reduction in child mortality, and three-fourths of the reduction in infant mortality to clean water. One of the most successful public health campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was for pure and pasteurized milk—so successful that we don’t really remember how deadly milk can be. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 made it a crime to sell adulterated food, introduced labeling laws, and led to government meat inspection and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Wool was the clothing material of choice before cotton displaced it. Contaminated milk was one of the major killers of children, transmitting typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Over the next week, we’ll take a closer look at deaths in childbirth and changes in life expectancy in adulthood.
– In a piece last week on Slate, Laura Helmuth took a long and interesting look at what she dubs "the most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago": the doubling of our lifespan, from about 40 years to about 80. She looked at the big reasons why, of which you probably could come up with a few—like vaccines, clean water, refrigeration. But Helmuth's fascinating follow-up piece takes things a step further, and her headline says it all: "Fourteen Oddball Reasons You're Not Dead Yet." Here are our favorite four: Cotton: Before we started wearing cotton we wore wool, which was tougher to clean. That made it a more welcoming home for body lice, which spread one of history's big killers: typhus. Satellites: Helmuth is referring to the weather-observing kind, which alert us to hurricanes with enough time to prepare and, importantly, evacuate. To wit, she cites a 1900 hurricane that killed 8,000 in Galveston. Hurricane Ike brought a higher storm surge in 2008, but the Texas Department of State Health Services identified just 74 deaths. Window screens: They keep out houseflies, and that has saved us from more than just some hand-swatting. Though Helmuth acknowledges that clean water and sewage treatment were the biggest factors in squashing the spread of potentially fatal diarrhea, flies were also a vector. Shoes: If you think disease-carrying flies sound gross, well, meet hookworms. These parasites find their way from the feces of an infected person (which were ostensibly on the ground) and into the body of another person through the feet. They did so frequently in the Southeast before wearing shoes became an encouraged practice. Head to Slate for the other 10 items on her list, which includes the residents of Framingham, Mass.