It's not the flu
It's poverty
iranian.com
February 21, 2006
iranian.com
When in London sometime I pass nearby St Mary's Hospital I look at the blue plaque quietly commemorating Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin. This article is dedicated to the memory of this saviour of mankind. This article is also attributed to the sad memory of this dying child watched by the waiting vulture. Our conscience need to think beyond our own welfare.
PARIS -- Let's not become a huge living mass of hypocandriacs. We live in a scaremongering sensationalist culture. It is not the Avian flu or Sars but rather poverty that is killing mankind, A child still dies of hunger every five seconds, eight years on from a pledge to halve the world's hungry by 2015. Today's headlines regularly highlight new outbreaks of disease around the world; the death of a duck in India gets more coverage than the death of a hungry child. Mankind has lost its bearing; the drunkenness of advancement and growth has made us insensitive to the real challenges. We make wrong comparisons developing self serving disaster patterns and expect pandemic as real threats in total disregard to the huge monumental growth of preventive and curative medicine since the turn of the century.
In the 19th century, scientists discovered that micro organisms were to blame for killer diseases like cholera and tuberculosis, and officials launched public health efforts to provide clean water supplies and waste-disposal systems. By 1900, the incidence of many infectious diseases had declined, but pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhoea and enteritis were still the top three causes of death and accounted for one-third of all deaths. Today, the top three causes of death are heart disease, cancer, and stroke, and 4.5 percent of deaths are attributable to pneumonia, influenza, and HIV.
The introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s provided a huge boost in the battle against infections; Antibiotics saved the lives of people with previously incurable illnesses like streptococcal infections and gonorrhoea. More recently, antiviral drugs have led to breakthroughs in the treatment of HIV and other diseases. We all know that in the last half of the 20th Century, deaths from infectious diseases greatly decreased, partly due to the discovery of antibiotics. Visualizing a future without cancer or AIDS is difficult, but 100 years ago it was probably just as hard for health workers to fathom wiping out polio or effectively treating bacterial infections. Yet those are just a few of the many miraculous advances in human health and safety in the 20th century. Since 1900, average life expectancy in the United States has increased from 40 to 76.7.
If one starts testing wild ducks and goose for viruses, one will definitely find some. These ducks and wild birds have lived with flu and viruses since time immemorial, we are here with our longevities that we ever enjoyed as humans race and huge increase in migratory populations of birds as a result of natural selection of species that can survive that change the best. Look at the American national symbol, the bald eagle, it has been rescued from the brink of extinction and from the status of endangered it is now listed as threatened, soon it is expected that it will be delisted. Avian flu threat amongst human beings would only erupt if there is a massive flu amongst birds and the bird migratory patterns may see a clear decline. |
