Guest post: By then, it will be too late
Originally a comment by Cluecat on Six out of ten.
As is mentioned in the other posts, this is a huge problem with industrial livestock raising all over the world.
There are a few antibiotic agents designated as the absolute “last line of defence” – to only ever be used in human treatment when literally nothing else has had any effect, and to never ever be routinely prescribed because of that critical designation.
These medications treat bugs that are resistant to every other antibiotic on the market, infections that cause horrible, drawn-out death. These meds are the reason we no longer have Sepsis Wards in healthcare settings in Western countries – although it looks like we might be heading back that way…
These are treatments that can save lives in extremis. They must be handled as the critical interventions that they are.
What happens instead? These critical medications are routinely added to animal feed, thrown around like candy in industrial farming settings, because using them means more efficient animal growth/less disease burden in atrocious conditions. This is once more focusing on profit at the expense of welfare – and a complete disregard for the wider consequences.
Areas in the Indian Subcontinent, certain countries in Africa, have been warning the rest of the world for decades. Multi-Drug Resistant TB has been an issue for many years. We are heading back to a time when a tiny scratch in the skin could be someone’s death warrant, as has been the case for most of human history. Sure, some of it is stupid people not completing the full course of antibiotics, or demanding them unnecessarily, but a huge amount of the problem is industrial farming methods. Profit uber alles.
All the Pharma companies have little interest in developing new anti-microbial agents because there’s no instant pay-off for their shareholders. Companies refuse to put new drugs through testing because it costs money, and that isn’t coming back to shareholders. Companies hang on to patents and refuse to make drugs availible for the same reasons.
Without firm support from governments and international health authorities, and a willingness to recognise this issue, it’s only going to get worse. Humans are stupid, and greedy. The people who are going to suffer are the same ones who always end up suffering, and only when the incredibly entitled and wealthy idiots driving the profit cycle find out that no amount of money will stop a lethal infection will there be a serious attempt to fix the issue. By then, it’ll be too late. Just like everything else.
I went to a lecture once by Professor Frank Fenner the then head of the John Curtin School of Medical Research in here in Canberra, . It was a while back now, but he said something very memorable. That was that if we could only isolate the human population into ‘island’ groups of 100,000 or less, we would according to the epidemiological calculations, wipe out every virus disease known to science.
Part of Fenner’s evidence was the well known fact relating to Pacific and other island populations; renowned for their radiant health; that is, until the trading ship comes in. Then everybody comes down with the latest version of flu.
This was manifested in the Covid Crisis, when epidemiologists (with no exceptions I know about) recommended mask-ups and lockdowns, and with only non-epidemiologists and such in the medical populations recommending otherwise.
There were the inevitable mavericks, who claimed the right to do as they pleased, all in the name of personal freedom, liberty and such. As with climatolgy sceptics, business-as-usual had to Trump everything else. (Please excuse the pun.) A few of these covid mavericks repented on their death-beds.
There is historical precedence. Lepers were historically isolated in leper colonies, and in some cases required to warn others of their approach with cries of ‘unclean. Unclean.!’ (At least, according to the Bible.) There was also an isolated leprosarium in Derby, Western Australia, that ran from 1936 until 1986. The Mormons, originally a sect of Christians persecuted by other sects for being TOO different, found themselves a patch of land in Utah that nobody else wanted, and there they built the start of the thriving city of Salt Lake.
Water can be extracted from the air if energy is available. It is and galore; in sunlight, the tides of the oceans, geothermal power coming up from nuclear reactions in the core of the Earth, wind, and increasingly stormy weather.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Trouble is, will there be will?
https://newrepublic.com/article/163666/covid-unvaccinated-deathbed-videos
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/alabama-doctor-who-treats-covid-19-patients-urges-vaccination-c-3472991
https://www.nit.com.au/winun-ngari-revive-australias-last-leprosarium/