Posted by Poultry on Sat, 27 Jan 2007 22:00 | #

I was reading recently about dangerous forms of staph bacteria that are now “in the community.”  Apparently, a person can become “colonized” with these bacteria without any immediate problem, but a skin wound can then introduce the pathogen internally and cause serious disease.  Note also that surveys of urban “health clubs” indicate that some of the equipment (I read of, for example, “medicine balls”) may be contaminated.  Not to mention any area of public gathering.

Like James and others here, I am old enough to remember an era in which one may have had to worry about the flu, but not multidrug resistant strains of deadly bacteria, SARS, and all the other microorganismal “benefits” of human biological “diversity.”

No public figure or health report is willing to go on record as to connect human migratory streams with increased risk of mortality and morbidity from infections diseases.  They did admit that the bedbug epidemic may be linked to “global travel”, but they are reticent to stress the link otherwise. 

And when some looked askance at Asian migratory flows during the SARS outbreak, the Asiatics were quick to cry discrimination.

After all, “share and share alike”, - eh?

Posted by alex zeka on Sun, 28 Jan 2007 09:38 | #

It’s quite interesting to note that mainstream authorities do recognise the dangers of diverse mixing, e.g. the syphilis brought across to MesoAmerica by the Conquistadors, to which the natives had no resistance, but only in a purely historical context. This is very odd, and requires not just ignoring a fact, but acknowledging it but not drawing the bloody obvious conclusion from it. Doublethink, eh.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 28 Jan 2007 09:49 | #

The current situation is even nastier since not only is horizontal transmission enhanced by international migration, but the diffusion of antibiotics technologies from Europeans to the rest of the world has resulted in a vastly greater population abusing antibiotics and creating resistant strains.  Thus we see not merely resistance but virulence increasing.  The use of “migrant workers” for our recklessly centralized food sources is most likely critical for the creation of some of these nasty killers.

Posted by Uberto on Sun, 28 Jan 2007 18:11 | #

“It’s quite interesting to note that mainstream authorities do recognise the dangers of diverse mixing, e.g. the syphilis brought across to MesoAmerica by the Conquistadors, to which the natives had no resistance, but only in a purely historical context.”
Posted by alex zeka on Sunday, January 28, 2007 at 08:38 AM | #

Actually, syphilis traveled the other way across the Atlantic - from the New World Indians to Old World Europeans.  A better example of a disease that decimated the Indigenous populations of the Americas after arriving from Eruope is smallpox.  There are reports of Indians so riddled with pockmarks and pus that their skin, which was plastered to the reed mats on which they slept, literally peeled off their bodies when they tried to move around.  Historians believe it was this horrible disease that killed between 50-80% of the “pre-contact” Amerindians.  And some medical authorities think we’re in for another round of this plague in the very near future…

Posted by alex zeka on Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:45 | #

Thanks for that correction, Uberto.