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MICROBES AND HUMAN DISEASES. |
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Microbes
have played a very significant role in shaping human
existance on this planet. If today the Caucasians are
enjoying the resources of three big continents of
America, Africa and Australia, they should be ever
grateful to the microbes. Those three fertile lands were
inhabited by the Natives who were never exposed to the
type of germs brought across the seas by the invading
Europeans. The white man’s guns and swords did not
kill as many Natives as did the germs brought by him. The
latter totally changed the face of those continents,
including the flora and founa. Today they are very thinly
populated by Europeans. Majority of the advanced
countries do not have the type of communicable diseases
we in the tropics are heir to, but they are having newer
problems with viruses of many new types, the leader being
the AIDS virus.
Poverty, ignorance, overcrowding, bad sanitary
surroundings, population migration, wars, famines and
pestilence cause so much of human misery. More than 70%
of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa are due to microbial
diseases. Robert Koch was the one responsible for most of
our ills in this area for a long time after he propounded
his theory, wherein he said that a disease is due purely
to a cause, such as a microbe. Medicine did not progress
any further for nearly 100 years, until in the year 1915,
an American physician, Theobald Smith, proclaimed that it
is the body’s host resistance that is at the
root of all our trouble and the microbes are there in the
atmosphere always. It is only when the body resistance
goes down do microbes produce illness. We are a
part of this cosmos where all life is interdependent.
Man’s proclivity for comfort has now made life
difficult for many species of animals and even symbiotic
microbes. Many of the newer varieties of innocuous germs
have started raising their ugly heads, to produce human
illness. In the recent past the British schools had an
epidemic of viral appendicitis, an unknown entity in the
past.
Newer microbial diseases are seen in places where they
were not present in the past and some of the older
diseases which showed a sign of remission have come back
with a vengeance now, a good example is malaria. Man has
changed many things in his own surroundings, the chief
amongst which is the global temperature. This will bring
in many new diseases in its wake. In the early part of
the sixteenth century when most of Europe was wiped out
by plague, Nature tried to come to man’s rescue.
Suddenly that continent became a degree centigrade cooler
and the rattus rattus, the black domestic rat, died a
natural death. With that died the pasturella pestis, the
organism that causes plague. The white rat, rattus
novigenous, could not harbour the plague germ; so Europe
was devoid of plague since then. Then came the white
plague, tuberculosis, which was a nightmare for them for
well over a century, before it almost disappeared from
the European continent. With the advent of AIDS, the
scourge of white plague is threatening the white man once
again.
We were told that we have conquered most of the microbial
diseases, but like the phoenix from the ashes the
microbes have risen again. Recent outbreak of diphtheria
in Eastern Europe after the downfall of the USSR, plague
in India, and many staphylococcal infections in the West
are reminders that things are not as good as they seem in
the microbial front. One would shudder to think of the
future consequences of hospital infections, as most of
the simple organisms are exposed to all kinds of
antibiotics in the hospital set up. They become immune to
them and develop resistance. A recent study in the UK
showed that school children admitted to hospitals for
minor illnesses and even those children exposed to the
hospital atmosphere acquired drug resistant germs in
their throats posing a serious threat to their future
health.
Wars have left millions homeless and forced them to flee
their homes. Studies of Rwandan refugees has shown the
prevalence of simple, but resistant, infections coming on
easily in their camps. Construction workers in India
migrating from one place to another in search of greener
pastures, are the root cause of spread of many
communicable diseases. Epidemics of cholera have spread
along the routes of commerce. Malaria has even spread to
Europe through the of travelers’ luggage, surviving
the cold of pressurized luggage cabins of our large
aircrafts. They spread around air ports and this new
epidemic is called airport malaria. The world has shrunk
a lot and doctors even in the West should be prepared to
see exotic microbial diseases, which they have never seen
all their lives.
There are now unprecedented opportunities to mix up
humans and animals from far and wide because of the
shrinking global markets. Newer tensions develop in the
various parts of the world due to political and economic
pressures. To give a small example, most wars have
resulted in more number of deaths due to microbial
diseases, than all the nuclear arsenal put together. The
shining example is influenza. This killed nearly twenty
million people in the year after the first world war and
it is surprising that it is capable of killing even
today. There have been periodic pandemics of this disease
almost every decade, many deaths during the epidemics
occur in able bodied youngsters.
The situation is gloomy and there is no solution in
sight. It is unlikely that the global scenario of
poverty, conflict, and political upheavals, will change
for the better in the foreseeable future. It is also
foolish to think that we can conquer these germs with the
help of more powerful antibiotics. The only solution is
to study the ecology of these and have a holistic
perspective of infectious diseases, taking advantage of
the lessons in the history of medicine that infections
wax and vane in societies due to extraneous causes. If we
can get some ideas from the world’s total
perspective, we may be able to do something in this
direction. An important step in this direction is the
setting up of the global weather monitoring unit by the
Unesco.
Microbes follow the changes in global warming and
cooling. If we catch them before that and destroy them,
epidemics could possibly be contained before inflicting
heavy damage by way of loss of human life. We also must
work with colleagues in the animal and plant world as
many germs are ubiquitous. Could we expect this kind of
wisdom, nay understanding, even in our own profession?!
[index]
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