More than a Little Rash

 

COVID grabs the headlines, as it should, but it is hardly the only raging or potentially raging disease we face. Parasites, viruses and bacteria are everywhere, lucking, looming and evolving to maximize their reproductive spread. Malaria. Measles. Dengue fever. Cholera. Ebola. Yellow fever. To name a few. We are also faced with the double whammy of Malthusian overpopulation – most experts suggest that the earth currently has about double the sustainable number of human beings – and climate change that is completely reconfiguring where people can live, thrive and even survive. Disease is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Plague, Pestilence, War and Famine – a concept graphically depicting nature’s command and control mechanism to limit human population explosion.

What all of this has created, on a global and macro demographic-economic level, is dramatic change. Humans either create opportunity with change or, like cats, are terrified by its unknown and often vicious impacts. We are witnessing a global political pressure to push humanity back to a more predictable time, simply, not only to stop change but to reverse its harsh reality, often to an earlier era which has since been glorified through mythical and nostalgic rose-colored glasses. But since that impossible task cannot be accomplished by the will of a democratic electorate, many on earth have opted for the impossible pledges of autocrats who convince them that going back in time is indeed doable. Change is explained by conspiracy theories and wishful thinking… reality has all too often left the building. Circling the wagons against change and those who do not fit the mythical paradigm of a past, more perfect society. Racism, ethnic and religious bias reign supreme. Scapegoats of history.

That incumbents seem powerless to stop change gives rise to expanding mythologies and patterns that can redefine healthy approaches to major problem solving by substituting hopeful but thoroughly misguided “solutions” no longer anchored in reality, scientific or otherwise. Although still a minority force in the world, for example, vaccine resistance against COVID is becoming more generalized to vaccine resistance for just about any disease. Diseases are simply slipping under the radar, getting lost in the tsunami of COVID waves, and posing threats that should have been long gone.

While we fight among ourselves, break apart into dysfunctional factions unable to confront obvious threats, diseases that should have been eliminated are taking complete advantage of this human disharmony. Just looking at one such surge, the vengeful return of measles, is one very good example. Mallory Locklear, writing for the January 4th Yale News, tells us: “More than 22 million children worldwide missed their first dose of the measles vaccine in 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That is 3 million more than the number of children who missed recommended doses in 2019, representing the largest increase in 20 years.

“Measles is a highly contagious disease and high rates of vaccination are required to prevent outbreaks. Approximately 95% of a population needs to be vaccinated against measles in order to achieve herd immunity. So this increase in missed vaccinations and lower rates of outbreak surveillance, which also decreased in 2020, put regional measles elimination at risk, public health leaders say.” 

To so many of us, measles represents a distant memory of a disease we all believe has been erased decades ago. Part of those required school vaccinations, at least here in the United States, that no one ever objected to over half a century of required inoculations. Just think what polio might have become (and there are still rare outbreaks) if vaccine resistance had been prevalent in the 1950s. But an increasing pattern of vaccine resistance, not just against COVID, is creating a sufficiently large body of exposed individuals to suggest that a return epidemic, even a pandemic, is very possible. 

When you hear of idiotic parents current holding “COVID parties” purposely to infect, and hopefully achieve a resultant “natural immunity” in their children, reminiscent of the “chicken pox” parties of the 1950s, you begin to understand how much more easily diseases can spread today than in recent memory. These “COVID kids” not only face an unknown and potentially fatal bout with Omicron, which may be less symptomatic than earlier variants on average, but they join the growing statistic of about 16% of those infected facing “long COVID” issues, some of which are life changing and permanent.

Back to the threat posited by measles. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, cited in the Yale News noted above, reminds us: “Measles, among respiratory viruses, is more serious than most. It has a higher death rate and complication rate, and for those reasons alone, we are alarmed. But the second element that is concerning is that it's more infectious than the other respiratory viruses, including coronavirus. It's simply easier to catch. When you have a diminution of the number of kids who are protected, you can pretty much count on there being outbreaks because the transmission is more robust and, therefore, the protection is more fragile, and we need a very high proportion of children to be vaccinated to achieve the so-called herd immunity.” Sigh… and enough general self-righteous anti-vaxxers exist, almost never held accountable for the harm they inflict, are taking their non-existent “God given and constitutional rights” to the brink, threatening to provide fertile breeding ground for the next pandemic.

I’m Peter Dekom, and until we can separate these conspiracy theory political vectors from the true solutions to medical and scientific reality, we can expect more major climate-related disasters and roiling epidemics, some potentially morphing into pandemics… as facts and democracy are increasingly crushed by politically opportunistic autocrats.