I was waiting for this, but it sends chills up and down my spine.
…we could lose a century of progress and find ourselves dying in the millions from tuberculosis, just like our 19th-century ancestors.
I was exposed to TB as a child, and had to have lung x-rays every year until I went to college. It was active for a short time, and I have some lesions that show up on x-rays, but my body managed to fight it off before I even knew I was sick. Maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones; I might have some immunity.
According to the original report, published Dec. 21 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, a hospital in Mumbai, India had identified 12 TB patients whose disease resisted all antibiotics. Nothing worked with them. All the patients appeared to have strains of TB known as multi-drug resistant (MDR-TB) and extremely drug resistant (XDR-TB).
Ever since the advent of sulfa drugs and penicillin, we have been locked in an arms race with bacteria. Antibiotics originally had wonderfully lethal effects on many infections. But in some cases a few bacteria had genetic resistance to a given drug, or the treatment wasn’t long or intense enough. Either way, the survivors learned to best such drugs. We came up with new drugs, and again they worked — until a few bacteria survived and multiplied.
What have we wrought? We now have a society of people whose immunity has not been tested, especially against a strain of superbugs. I remember when Handsome Son had a string of ear infections. We went from antibiotic to antibiotic, ending up with one that cost $3.10 per teaspoon. I swore that if he knocked it on the floor, he was going to lick it up from wherever it landed. Fortunately, he was a calm child, and we never had to test my determination in the matter. It was alarming that the regular antibiotics had already become so ineffective in such a short period of time. I was diligent in giving him all of his medications, never shorting the dosages.
Will we end up like the aliens in “War of the Worlds,” who were killed not by the humans they hunted, but by the smallest residents of the planet they wanted to dominate. What will be ironic is that we will have created our own demise.
So the prospect of untreatable TB is a disturbing one. WHO notes that in the Americas, only 2.1 persons per 100,000 die of TB. With a totally drug-resistant strain, that rate could easily exceed Africa’s current rate of 50 deaths per 100,000.
I have hopes that our collective intellect will find a way of protecting humanity from succumbing to ourselves.
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