THE BATTLE AGAINST DISEASE
Twenty years ago many infectious diseases were on the brink of extinction. We won the war by improving sanitation, controlling mosquitoes, vaccinations, and discovering new modern antibiotics.
Like Afghanistan, old adversaries are coming back and new infections are emerging. We are exposing ourselves to serious unexpected threats.
We thought bugs were no competition for our big brains. How wrong we were. Recent West Nile fever in the U.S. was totally unexpected. Yet the virus infected over 50,000 of us, sickened over 2000 and killed a dozen. Yet there are more wild infections delivered intentionally by terrorists.
Ebola, a virus so deadly for us humans, kills us so fast it has very little chance to transfer person to person and is unlikely ever to be a pandemic.
Mosquito borne viruses causing dengue hemorrhagic fever and yellow fever were wiped out in the 1940s. It is now remerging in south and Central America and the Caribbean and even the southern U.S. With more people on the planet, the mosquito can breed easier and become a public health disaster.
Tuberculosis is now resistant to modern antibiotics in Russia and elsewhere. Individual droplets make it easy to transmit. Its close association with HIV doesn’t helps. Malaria killing over 1.2 million people annually is now resistant to standard medicine
Twenty major maladies have reemerged in drug restistant forms in the past 25 years. They include Rift Valley fever, hanta-virus, and cholera. Scientists have found over 30 previously unknown human diseases for which there is no cure at the present time.
The world is changing. People are hacking into previously inaccessable areas, where bacteria and viruses are hungry to get us, their new warm-blooded hosts. Third world countries are now crowded in large areas, and their sewage and water systems are a mixing bowl for new disease creation.
The world favors the bugs and gives them a huge advantage. There are a lot more of them than us. They multiply in minutes not years, and rapidly evolve. And we play right into their hands by abusing antibiotics, and through our transport of food and animals. Today bacteria have it easy. They have a greater ability to bloom with our centralized food system and water distribution.
Plagues are nothing new. Small pox existed before Cleopatra and the virus continue to kill over a half billion people, until we vaccinated the world. Officially it was eradicated in 1980.
Black Death in the 14th century wiped out 25% of Europe in just 4 years. Columbus and his sailors wiped out many of the native Indians here when he brought diseases carried by his African slaves. In 1918 Influenza killed 20 million Americans, compared to WW I losses of 8.5 million casualties.
Our war on terror alerts us to terrorists who could sow the seeds of a devastating disease. Billions of infectious particles can be stored in a small vial and smuggled into our country. After all, Anthrax a non-contagious disease found its way in the mail system.
Infectious agents can trigger panic and fear worse than a nuclear attack. When 9/11 occurred we thought the country might be under global attack. The fed officials grounded planes and 3500 crop duster planes for fear they could release a cloud of deadly bacteria.
Disease is a huge source of human suffering and is very destabilizing. We know no nation is an island now that the world is flat. The bacteria regardless of their origin can travel anywhere and affect anyone. Global disease is a national security threat, making bacteria of equal concern as nuclear warheads.
It’s hard to implement public health measures in countries always at war. High tech surveillance at 110 centers around the world collect influenza viruses from patients each winter and genetic tests are done on these viruses. The scientists predict which strain will dominate in the coming year and vaccine companies make new batches of exactly the right vaccine for the next flu season.
Vaccinations are the most cost effective weapons of the war on diseases. Worldwide over 2 billion chldren have been inoculated, over 40% of the world population.
Simple solutions work too. About 25% of childhood malaria deaths could be prevented if kids simply slept under mosquito tents treated with insecticide, at a cost of $5 per child.
Perhaps we should take aim at the most virulent strains of each bug, since they are bound to survive anyway and we might get along with the weaker ones. The few deadly bacteria that remain and become resistant would need to compete with the much bigger population of its less virulent peers. With only six billion of us against so many more of them, we need to somehow control evolution.
Source: Nat. Geographic, Feb. 2002
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