Vive La Resistance (Not)

When the press of humanity hits Malthusian threat levels, nature has a litany of fine tools beyond the biblical Four Horsemen (war, conquest, famine, and death) to reduce our numbers. Add our proclivity to kill each other without even needing the excuse of war, variations on a theme like genocide, or perhaps it is that lovely and seductive notion of plague, and solutions abound. Maybe the animals gone extinct are cheering from somewhere, but we are under some very severe threats. Global warming is fueling all sorts of nasties, but evolution is also culling the human herd in other massively sinister terms. The Ebola virus was a recent violation that just keeps on taking.

We see outbreaks of SARS, Ebola, HIV as cyclical realities that have followed humankind since rats generously spread the bubonic plague centuries ago. But there is an underlying trend that sophisticated researchers and healthcare professionals are witnessing with startling and terrifying consistency. What, for example, do Klebsiella pneumonia, E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria have in common? They fall into a growing category of “antimicrobial resistant” “bugs” of one sort or another.

The growth and mutation of so-called “super-bugs” – a growing body of germs that have evaded or are beginning to evade available treatments – is accelerating. While such resistant bugs currently kill about 700,000 people a year today, their accelerating growth threatens to escalate to grow to an annual 10 million, greater still than the number of people who die from cancer every year.

The above numbers come from a UK governmental study, headed by Jim O'Neill, a former Goldman Sachs chief economist, who was appointed to that post by Prime Minister David Cameron. And of course, an economist ran the numbers and projected that by 2050, the total cost of such antimicrobial resistant infections could hit $100 trillion. Death, disruption and misery… and we live in budget-cutting times…

We’ve overprescribed antibiotics with such volume that the bacteria they are intended to kill have mutated and developed an increasing resistance to any such drug. Further, too many of us have stopped taking a prescribed antibiotic before taking the full prescribed course of treatment. Effectively, this exposes the target bacteria to a weakened trace of antibiotics, allowing them to survive… and then, having survived, they now have an effective resistance to that prescription.

For those with compromised immune systems, particularly the elderly, there is even a greater susceptibility to infection. And with the possibility of antimicrobial resistant bugs lurking – particularly in hospitals where the sick congregate – many folks are postponing surgery or even learning to live without. "People who are waiting for joint replacement, transplant surgery, cesarean section, those are high risk operations for infection afterwards. If we don't have antibiotics that work anymore, that's serious stuff. It means we can't do those operations," Dr Hilary Jones told interviewers on the Good Morning Britain television show. Oh…

So as our government defunds medical research as evidence of their “intelligent fiscal responsibility,” the solutions to control these diabolical super-bugs are fading into the ether. As I pointed out in my October 14^th It Ain’t Swine Flu blog, Ebola would probably have not killed remotely the number of people it has if the government had just continued doing what it had been doing for decades until “austerity” took root. Fund research. With poor countries unlikely to generate a solid economic justification for Ebola research, the private pharma world had little or no motivation to pick up the research slack.

If those little bugs had mouths and vocal cords, they’d be cheering. Cuts to environmental enforcement and medical research have only gotten bigger under the new $1.1 billion budget bill that has just passed Congress to keep the federal government going for a few more months. So years from now, with epidemics and pandemics of antimicrobial resistant bugs, how will our future generations look back at what we have done to them… not to mention the short-term suffering we are creating… right now.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly how self-destructively stupid does a candidate have to be today to get elected?