The Afrikaner press has caught up with superbug crisis:
As a microbiologist, I really should have told you about this ages and ages ago.
Oh, wait… I did.
Maybe I should have told you in Afrikaans.
Sorry, bit of an oversight on my part there. Here you go: Ons is almal gaan sterf.
Better now?
I spotted a nice little rant from Jeffrey Kluger on Time.com on anti-vaxxers.
I hope that writing it was some sort of cathartic experience for Jeffrey, as while it carefully explains all the reasons that anti-vaxxers are foolish, short-sighted and downright wrong, it will have about as much effect as bringing a banana to a gunfight. But I recognise that sometimes you just need to get these things out of your system before the frustration makes your brain go totes cray cray and you start using sloppy internet slang.
Parents who oppose vaccines are not only misinformed, they’re spoiled, having grown up in a world that stands behind the berms built by the scientists and vaccine developers who came before them. If you’ve never seen measles — or polio or whooping cough or mumps — you have the luxury of believing they don’t exist.
Forget the pretty flowers and the Instagrammable sunsets. There’s another side to Nature: viruses, evil bacteria, disease, sickness. Yep, sadly, it turns out that Nature is actually a bit of a bitch. As Jeffrey points out, science (or “messing with nature”) allows us to live longer, it means that we don’t die in childhood, it means that simple infections don’t kill us anymore (for the moment, anyway).
Because those were all things that happened a lot before science happened (see here).
Now, I think that those are good things. Positive things. Fine reasons to embrace and celebrate the progress we have made. Working in science, it’s disappointing when others don’t feel that way, but it’s tragic when their irresponsible decisions impact on the defenceless individuals in our society.
I’m not going to carry on. My rant would have about as much effect as Jeffrey’s and rather than raising my blood pressure by thinking about the idiots, I’d rather be doing my (little) bit to stop quite so many people dying of TB. That said, do click through and have a read of Jeffrey’s column, because it does make very good sense.
An evening in hipster paradise tonight, with burgers and beers at The Dog’s Bollocks in town.
To be fair, the burgers – despite being huge – failed to live up to the hype, but the beer was good and the experience was pretty cool.
After visiting the Oranjezicht City Farm on the weekend and now downing craft beer in the backstreets of Gardens, it’s surely only a matter of time before I squeeze my muscular thighs into a pair of skinny jeans and chuck on some thick framed spectacles.
Or not.
Busy today, but here’s a nice little video from the Cape Brewing Company, showing the passion of Head Brewmaster Wolfgang Koedel for his work:
And, in true Blue Peter style: here’s one I drank earlier, complete with angelic halo. It’s lovely stuff.
Thanks, Wolfgang.
Infectious diseases are infectious. It’s kinda where they got their name from. I love infectious diseases, I always have. And, since I left University (about n years ago now) if it wasn’t for infectious diseases I wouldn’t have had a job.
Ever.
As I’ve mentioned several times on here, infectious diseases are far from being beaten by the supposed might of humankind. In fact, they’re actually winning our war against them, what with their rapid reproduction and their pacy genetic mutations. Still, we have had some small successes.
One of the other things which makes life difficult for us puny humans is the diverse tactics which we have to employ in order to achieve these positive outcomes. And here come a couple of good cases in point.
China has more than halved its tuberculosis (TB) prevalence.
Now, as you’ll know, TB is very close to my heart (not literally), and this is truly a huge battle for China to have won/be winning. It’s being fought with the joint weaponry of money, organisation and a huge expansion of a community-based disease control programme.
Lead researcher Dr Yu Wang, from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, said: “One of the key global TB targets set by the Stop TB Partnership aims to reduce tuberculosis prevalence by 50% between 1990 and 2015.
This study in China is the first to show the feasibility of achieving such a target, and China achieved this five years earlier than the target date.”
And it gives hope for other countries with high TB rates, South Africa included. And we do have, even as part of this apparently completely dysfunctional government of ours, a pretty decent guy heading up the Department of Health. I have high hopes that he will be very interested in this aggressive approach demonstrated by China. As we know:
TB remains a big issue in many countries, including India, Russia and many African nations. Better diagnostic tools and treatments are still needed.
Indeed. No quick fix here, but please be aware that I’m working on it.
And then a wholly different approach to stopping a wholly different disease – attempts to combat the recent Ebola outbreak in Guinea include banning the eating of bats:
[Health Minister] Mr Lamah announced the ban on the sale and consumption of bats during a tour of Forest Region, the epicentre of the epidemic, reports the BBC’s Alhassan Sillah from the capital, Conakry.
People who eat the animals often boil them into a sort of spicy pepper soup, our correspondent says. The soup is sold in village stores where people gather to drink alcohol.
Other ways of preparing the bats to eat include drying them over a fire.
And yes, Ebola loves bats. They’re widely recognised as the probable reservoir for the virus (i.e. where it hangs out before it kills loads of humans) and if you’re going to eat a bat packed full of Ebola virus, surprise surprise, you’re going to catch Ebola virus.
Ensuring that Guinea’s Ebola patients take a cocktail of antibiotics daily, as China has done with its TB patients, would have about as much effect as preventing those Chinese TB patients from eating bats.
None.
There is no one set approach here, no magic bullet. Different diseases require radically different methods of prevention and cure.
It’s nice that we’re beginning to get at least some of them right.