Wasn’t it only yesterday that Paul Ehrlich predicted a population explosion?¹ Now, only a few years later, fertility is declining, and populations are shrinking throughout the world with few exceptions. The United States has maintained its population only by attracting immigration, mostly from Mexico, but now it suddenly faces an unexpected and even more ominous menace: declining longevity.  

For decades American experts have noted exponential increases in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and rheumatoid diseases, but the implications are ignored.² Now, insurance companies are suddenly reporting increased death benefits that reflect declining average life span in the American population for three years running.³ The CDC attributes these changes to suicides, drug abuse, and COVID, but these tragic factors alone cannot account for the decreasing longevity of the entire population, nor can conventional medicine explain the cause.⁴ The implications are not rocket science, and they are not new.

Normally the stress mechanism functions efficiently and unobtrusively to repair tissues and regulate organ function, but like any mechanism, it has operational limits. When those limits are exceeded by unremitting combinations of environmental stresses, it becomes hyperactive and begins to waste body resources, and produce excessive and defective products that damage tissues and disrupt organ function. Such harmful stress mechanism hyperactivity manifests as disease. Thus, stress mechanism hyperactivity is the universal cause of disease, and what appears to be distinctly different and unrelated diseases is determined by fluctuating stress mechanism hyperactivity. For example, chickenpox and smallpox viruses cause pustules; mumps virus produces parotid swelling; measles manifests Koplik spots, and diphtheria forms fibrous membranes in the pharynx. However, most disease instigates generalized symptoms including fever, fatigue, rashes, edema, malaise, and exudates that defy definitive diagnosis. 

1. Ehrlich, P. R. The population bomb.  (Ballantine Books, 1968) ↩︎
2. Sciubba, J. D. 8 billion and counting : how sex, death, and migration shape our world. First edition. edn,  (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022) ↩︎
3. Hailey Ross, J. W. US death-benefit payouts hit record high in 2021 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-death-benefit-payouts-hit-record-high-in-2021-69102708, <https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-death-benefit-payouts-hit-record-high-in-2021-69102708> (March 15, 2022) ↩︎
4. Devitt, M. CDC Data Show U.S. Life Expectancy Continues to Decline, <https://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20181210lifeexpectdrop.html> (2018) ↩︎