Multiple Drug Resistant (MDR) Tuberculosis poses a serious and increasing threat to global health.
In Baku, capital of Azerbaidzhan, 25% of all tuberculosis patients present with MDR. This is the highest world sample rate, but the global ratio of MDR to total TB infection, is now over 5%. The total number of victims increases globally by more than half a million per year.
The TB bacterium was always treated by efficacious antibiotics, although such treatment regimes were time sensitive. It required a long term discipline on the part of the patient and it imposed a big cost on health authorities.
Some authorities prefer to hospitalize patients to ensure that treatment is persistent, but that is not practical. Unfortunately too many patients are slacking on their treatment and this has enabled the sickness to survive and mutate into drug resistant strains that not only impair the survivability of patients but also increase patient to patient transmission of this virulent and dangerous infection.
I wrote earlier on Avian flu and its relationship to the Spanish flu that killed between 20 and 40 million people in 1918/19. A new threat of Avian flu is imminent and Tamiflu, the only known defense against a pandemic, is now reported to be ineffective against emerging strains of Avian flu. This concern is now compounded by a dangerous upward trend in MDR TB infection levels.
TB is also a side effect of AIDS, because we all have dormant strains of TB that reside below our immune thresholds, but AIDS compromises immunity thus enabling tragic infections to take hold and claim lives of already very ill patients. AIDS has not become the monster that we once predicted, but it could become a vector for TB transmission, a great monster that has never been beaten.
The world is a sick place. Other factors that are aggravating global health concerns include global warming, which is enhancing the viability of diseases that have until now been well restrained by healthy climactic conditions.
I saw a documentary on anthrax infections in South African game reserves. It showed what happens when browsers, like the Kudu antelope, eat dried leaves in drought conditions. This scratches their guts and enables blood infusion of this highly virulent antigen, enabling it to rise from its dormancy within the soils we daily tread. Of course, environmentally astute conservationists have come to see this all as just another day in paradise, for anthrax outbreaks merely restore the balance between land capacity and population. Floods eventually wash it all away and restore the balance between life and death. That is also true for seasonal human infections that are annually cut back by winter frosts, thereby ensuring the sustainability of human life and a check on disease.
However, the conditions that have so effectively regulated health on the planet, including human developed interventions such as antibiotics, are being marginalized by changes in world around us.
The fourth horseman of the apocalypse seems to be on the march, exposing human folly and bringing swift and tragic recompense for unprincipled human development. We have not been good stewards of our inheritance and now our children face the consequences of decades of human profligacy.
I do not smart when I report on these things for generally it is innocent lives in poor, marginalized nations that bear the brunt of progress, whilst the rich just get richer at their expense. I am deeply saddened by what is happening and hope that reason will prevail before it is too late.
© Peter Eleazar at http://www.bethelstone.com/
In Baku, capital of Azerbaidzhan, 25% of all tuberculosis patients present with MDR. This is the highest world sample rate, but the global ratio of MDR to total TB infection, is now over 5%. The total number of victims increases globally by more than half a million per year.
The TB bacterium was always treated by efficacious antibiotics, although such treatment regimes were time sensitive. It required a long term discipline on the part of the patient and it imposed a big cost on health authorities.
Some authorities prefer to hospitalize patients to ensure that treatment is persistent, but that is not practical. Unfortunately too many patients are slacking on their treatment and this has enabled the sickness to survive and mutate into drug resistant strains that not only impair the survivability of patients but also increase patient to patient transmission of this virulent and dangerous infection.
I wrote earlier on Avian flu and its relationship to the Spanish flu that killed between 20 and 40 million people in 1918/19. A new threat of Avian flu is imminent and Tamiflu, the only known defense against a pandemic, is now reported to be ineffective against emerging strains of Avian flu. This concern is now compounded by a dangerous upward trend in MDR TB infection levels.
TB is also a side effect of AIDS, because we all have dormant strains of TB that reside below our immune thresholds, but AIDS compromises immunity thus enabling tragic infections to take hold and claim lives of already very ill patients. AIDS has not become the monster that we once predicted, but it could become a vector for TB transmission, a great monster that has never been beaten.
The world is a sick place. Other factors that are aggravating global health concerns include global warming, which is enhancing the viability of diseases that have until now been well restrained by healthy climactic conditions.
I saw a documentary on anthrax infections in South African game reserves. It showed what happens when browsers, like the Kudu antelope, eat dried leaves in drought conditions. This scratches their guts and enables blood infusion of this highly virulent antigen, enabling it to rise from its dormancy within the soils we daily tread. Of course, environmentally astute conservationists have come to see this all as just another day in paradise, for anthrax outbreaks merely restore the balance between land capacity and population. Floods eventually wash it all away and restore the balance between life and death. That is also true for seasonal human infections that are annually cut back by winter frosts, thereby ensuring the sustainability of human life and a check on disease.
However, the conditions that have so effectively regulated health on the planet, including human developed interventions such as antibiotics, are being marginalized by changes in world around us.
The fourth horseman of the apocalypse seems to be on the march, exposing human folly and bringing swift and tragic recompense for unprincipled human development. We have not been good stewards of our inheritance and now our children face the consequences of decades of human profligacy.
I do not smart when I report on these things for generally it is innocent lives in poor, marginalized nations that bear the brunt of progress, whilst the rich just get richer at their expense. I am deeply saddened by what is happening and hope that reason will prevail before it is too late.
© Peter Eleazar at http://www.bethelstone.com/
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