Our Un-Winnable Fight Against Disease

chicken slaughterWhen I was a teenager, Scientific-American magazine published a ‘game of life’ by John Conway. In those days before computers, the simple algorithm presented a graph-paper model of emergent complex behaviour, in which, if you had too many ‘people’ too close together, some of them would die of overcrowding, and if you had too few, they would die of isolation. No matter how you arranged the starting population, it would finally either achieve a cyclic stasis or die out altogether (unless you allowed, unrealistically, for a world of unlimited space).

The results are remarkably similar to what happens in real populations. There are, to use the now-famous expression, limits to growth. Exceed them, and the population goes into collapse, either following a normal curve or until some new self-sustainable stasis is reached. If the collapse is too severe or too prolonged, the species becomes extinct.

In our modern world, we keep trying to change the rules of the game in our favour. We have developed antibiotics and hygiene practices to try to defy the diseases that specifically target overcrowded species like ours. We have learned to steal resources from future generations to prolong todayís population spiral, a staggering population explosion that is utterly unsustainable. We may delay the inevitable a while longer, but nature always bats last, and no species can defy her astonishingly complex and effective self-regulation mechanisms (or the laws of thermodynamics) forever. The longer we drag out our unsustainable growth, the more severe the correction that will take place to restore stasis, and the greater the risk of total extinction. The bigger we get, the harder we will fall.

Two of the most amazing and adaptable creatures on the planet are bacteria and poxviruses. Despite the antibiotic (literally, anti-life) chemical soup we soak ourselves and our habitats in, bacteria remain greater in total biomass on this planet than humans (they’re the only species that can claim that honour). Bacteria have an astonishing ability to mutate quickly to become immune to anything we can throw at them. They exist in the hottest deserts, the coldest places on the planet’s surface and far underground where gravitational pressure makes life impossible for other creatures. They are far more resilient and diverse than our species.

Poxviruses exist for virtually every animal species on the planet, and some of the more prolific species have many different poxviruses, each designed by evolution to target only that one species. As the population density of that species rises, the contagiousness and ability of poxviruses to thrive both increase exponentially. Were it not for mosquito poxviruses for example, the world would be covered in swarms of mosquitoes thick enough to block the sun and render most species (including us) quickly extinct. As part of the delicate balance and interconnectedness of life, we owe our very existence to poxviruses. We have, in thanks, eradicated the only currently-known poxvirus targeted at our species: smallpox. We did it by inoculating billions of humans, by contaminating them with the cow poxvirus. The bovine pox is not targeted at us, so it does us no harm, but it is close enough to the smallpox virus to give us immunity to the latter. How long it will take for a new human poxvirus to emerge, or for some latent strain of smallpox (buried underground, where anthrax also lies, or deliberately released by some antisocial person) to discover a whole new generation of uninoculated victims, we do not know. Itís not a matter of if, itís a matter of when.

Much of the current attention of pandemic planners is focused on the influenza virus. Like poxviruses, most influenza viruses are targeted at specific species, and do best where the populations are horrifically overcrowded and homogeneous (no genetic diversity). The modern factory farm with hundreds of thousands of weakened (through lack of sun, exercise, freedom and other essentials of life), nearly-identical animals crowded into an obscenely small area and subjected to horrific daily stress provides an absolutely perfect breeding ground for such viruses. That’s the role of viruses in nature, after all ñ to weed out unnaturally overpopulated creatures and bring the ecosystem back into healthy balance. And voilý ñ poultry flu.

Although viruses rarely make the jump from one species to another, they are very adaptable creatures, and such jumps will occur as random events as the species looks to identify other overcrowded creatures. The more interactions between an infected species and another species, the more opportunity for such a jump to occur. The huge amount of handling of poultry by humans is an open invitation for such evolutionary transformations, and the risk is compounded by the fact we now move poultry from place to place around the globe as often as we move people. As volume and distance of travel of infected creatures from one overpopulated area to another increases, the risk of cross-contamination and inter-species infection rises exponentially. We are just asking for it. So it is no surprise that scientists now predict that the next flu pandemic is overdue and will probably be the result of evolutionary advances enabling easier spread from poultry to humans and then from humans to other humans.

Our solution is to pre-emptively kill hundreds of millions of healthy birds (often gruesomely, but arguably we are at least and at last putting them out of the misery of their horrendous caged lives), and to inject and soak the poultry in other toxins that will encourage even more rapid mutation of bacteria and viruses to forms that are immune to the worst poisons we can invent. Our anti-life inventions will wipe us out long before they will render ‘germs’ extinct. An alien watching all this from afar would conclude we had taken leave of our senses.

One of the most remarkable results of the excessive use of antibiotics is a new strain of bacterial infections generally referred to as MRSA: methicillin (and orthocillin)-resistant staph bacteria. MRSA infections are usually controllable through isolation of sick patients, but they’re highly contagious and have caused fatalities, especially in patients undergoing surgery, and flesh-eating disease. Our predictable response to infections that resist the most inexpensive, safe and popular antibiotics is to prescribe more expensive, less safe antibiotics. But now even the second level of more unpleasant antibiotics ñ vancomycins ñ has been trumped by new bacterial infections (called VRSA and VRE) that are resistant to them too. And to make matters worse, many common bacteria like e.coli and salmonella have now evolved an enzyme called ESBL that makes them immune to known antibiotics as well. Nature always bats last.

If that weren’t enough, nature is also working on an even more ingenious way to bring our numbers back under control. Itís called a prion, and unlike bacteria or viruses, prions aren’t even alive. They’re a kind of toxic evolutionary protein that is also, surprise, species-specific. Mad cow disease (BSE) is caused by one kind of prion, and sheep scapie by another. These are horrible diseases, quite contagious within species. And, surprise, they also sometimes make the jump from one species to another. There is compelling evidence that a variant of Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (vCJD) is caused by the same prion that causes BSE. That’s why we’ve recently added tens of thousands of healthy cows to the list of slaughter victims in our mindless effort to prevent an epidemic of vCJD. Until very recently we have been casually feeding ground-up waste products from cows to other farmed animals and even pets (creatures that would not, in the wild, eat cows), increasing the likelihood of inter-species prion transmission. The problem is, because it’s not alive, we can’t kill prions with antibiotics or anti-anything. Nature has quickly moved ahead of us in this baseball game, and our casualties and costs in a losing cause are already massive.

I could go on, but I think you get my point. In our fight against diseases, we remain blindly convinced that medicine and technology are somehow going to keep us ahead of the game indefinitely. Such a belief is pure theology, and flies in the face of any rational study of science and history. Sooner or later we must drastically reduce our numbers and concentration, and the numbers and crowding and ill-health of farmed animals, or nature will do it for us, in ways that will be increasingly unpleasant the longer we delay. I think most of us appreciate this instinctively, ‘in our bones’. Whether we have what it takes to act on that voluntarily, to overcome our foolish pride, isanother matter.

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8 Responses to Our Un-Winnable Fight Against Disease

  1. Alex Shalman says:

    Hey Dave,Always a pleasure to read your sensual and optimistic writing. What you say seems very logical to me as you’ve attacked our special from every possible direction. You may say I am in denial, but I believe that we are going to make it, as a species. Where theres a new disease there is a new cure, where there is a will there is a way.AS – http://www.alexshalman.com

  2. MLU says:

    You know, that house you’re living in isn’t going to last forever. It remains subject to the forces of decay and some time, it’s going to collapse. You might as well quit denying reality and burn it now and move into the swamp.Though we will lose some battles, we are nowhere near the limits of what we can learn and do to reduce the suffering caused by disease. People who remain engaged in that struggle aren’t fools who see less than you. But neither does their sense of themselves as having superior insights and morality depend on the whole world that doesn’t love them enough collapsing around them.

  3. lugon says:

    From here http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showpost.php?p=63543&postcount=10I collect this quote: “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, lies your calling.” AristotleI thought you might like to know. :-)

  4. Ken Hirsch says:

    Despite your insistence, we continue to make progress and people live longer every year. There’s no good reason to think that this won’t continue.Most prion diseases seem to be hardly contagious at all. The only exception I know of is the Chronic Wasting Disease which is spreading in the wild in the U.S. (Note that it is spreading *in the wild*–yes, wild animals get diseases, too.)”… nature is also working on an even more ingenious way to bring our numbers back under control” I hope you’re just speaking metaphorically here. “Nature” doesn’t work to keep our numbers under control at all. Parasites (if not prions) evolve to increase their own numbers, not to decrease the number of their hosts–sometimes it just works out that way.”… bacteria remain greater in total biomass on this planet than humans (they’re the only species that can claim that honour)”. First, bacteria are not a single species. Second, there’s at least 500 million tons of one species of krill (http://tinyurl.com/26o5zh). That’s more than all the humans combined. There’s at least one billion tons of Douglas Fir living in the United States alone. That’s two examples off the top of my head.

  5. The comments above seem to miss the points of the article, and I’m not sure Ken’s ever written anything you’ve written before about Gaia and nature. “I believe that we are going to make it, as a species” — make it where?It seems to be to be a warning against thinking that somehow we can push back nature and create safe little havens for ourselves with no consequences now or in the future. The harder we push, the harder it pushes back and eventually we’ll fall over. To say that “we continue to make progress and people live longer every year” is missing half the story — you’re just talking about the pushing bit. And I don’t think anyone would say that we should stop any research or treatment just because of this, as this is a complex problem and there isn’t a simple solution. Take it as food for thought rather than becoming aggressively defensive.

  6. Theresa says:

    Nature always bats last. I like that expression. New Human systems of relationships could also emerge at the same time that old systems are falling apart.

  7. Ed says:

    Instead of creating disease to kill people off, it would be nicer if nature did something to decrease the success rate of births within the human species. That way noone has to suffer and the population growth is kept under control. Man-made birth control is helping but not quite as effective as it needs to be.

  8. andrew says:

    “Infectious prion particles are composed largely, if not entirely, of an abnormal isoform of the prion protein, which is encoded by a chromosomal gene.”In other words gene therapy and other forms of innoculation could possibly make cows and other animals less likely to produce the prions in the first place. Aside from that though, your thesis that the erradication of pox viruses has allowed mankind to exceed naturally occuring population limits is really interesting. What do you think of alternatives to antiobiotics though such as Phage Therapy? As usual this was a really cool post.

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