Thursday September 4, 2008
Media feeding our phobia about bacteria
What\’s with the media hysteria over listeria? I could understand a panic over something as deadly as the Ebola virus, or as contagious as SARS.
But unless I\’ve seriously misunderstood the health bulletins, listeriosis is neither fatal nor contagious.
It can cause deaths, certainly — so far, 12 in the whole of Canada. But it is life threatening only for those already weakened by other conditions such as age, infancy, pregnancy, or other illnesses. In those circumstances, it\’s rarely clear whether the listeria bacterium caused their deaths, or merely hastened a process that was already well underway.
Nor is listeriosis transmitted person to person — by physical touch, as are colds, or by aerosol, the way TB and pneumonic plague spread.
According to the experts, only seven out of a million healthy people are infected with virulent listeria each year.
In fact, I suspect that most people in Canada already have a few of those pesky little listeria monocytogenes cells within their bodies. They\’re found in soil, vegetation, water, sewage, silage and in animal feces.
In other words, it\’s almost impossible to avoid contact with them, somewhere, sometime.
Living in a sterile world
But we who live in North America have a phobia about bacteria. We demand antibiotics at the first sign of sickness. We buy bacteria-killing household cleansers to sterilize kitchen counters and bathrooms. We slather ourselves with anti-bacterial soaps in the shower.
In reality, we couldn\’t live without bacteria. Our skins are covered with bacteria. Our guts are filled with them. They make digestion possible.
If some miracle of medical science could remove every cell that contains human DNA from a human body, there would still be enough bacterial cells left to provide the recognizable shape of the body that used to be there.
We live in a symbiotic relationship with bacteria. They need us; we need them.
In olden days, people developed immunities because they were exposed to common bacteria from early childhood on. Provided they survived their initial exposure, they developed antibodies. Those antibodies protected them far better than synthetic pharmaceuticals can today.
Today\’s obsession with a bacteria-free environment means that when potential threats get into our food or water, we topple like dominoes. We have no natural resistance any more.
How others might see us
Thanks to the Internet, people all around the world can access Canadian news. I wonder how they feel when they watch or read about our listeriosis panic.
Translate our situation into the context of, say, sub-Saharan Africa.
In some African countries, one out of every three will die from AIDS and HIV-related complications because they cannot afford medication that could save their lives.
HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria form a deadly triumvirate — each exploiting the weaknesses caused by the other diseases.
AIDS, for example, has created a tsunami of TB in many countries. Many people are afflicted by both illnesses. Each year TB claims the lives of half a million Africans — the highest per capital incidence of TB in the world (28%).
Over the past 15 years, TB rates have doubled across Africa; in high HIV areas, they have tripled.
A recent study also suggests that people with HIV are twice as likely to catch malaria.
Malaria afflicts 500 million people each year, worldwide. It causes up to 1.5 million deaths, and another million or more as a result of malaria-caused anaemia. An estimated 80% of the world\’s malaria cases occur in — you guessed it — sub-Saharan Africa.
Like listeria, malaria is an opportunistic disease. It targets those whose systems are already under stress — the aged, infants, and pregnant women. An estimated 30 per cent of all recorded deaths during pregnancy are attributed to malaria infection.
In Africa, children under five years and pregnant women bear the brunt of the malaria because of lower or undeveloped immunity. It is the leading cause of death for under-fives in Africa — killing 1.1 million every year.
Dr. Jeffery Sachs, economist at Columbia University, asserts that every month, about 150,000 children die of malaria in Africa. Every two months, more people die of malaria than perished in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
One out of every five children in Africa dies before reaching their fifth birthday.
And then they hear about us panicking over a mere dozen deaths? We lose more in traffic accidents every single day!
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I don\’t intend to minimize the impact of those 12 deaths. For family, for loved ones, each death is a totality. It\’s a mountain, a landslide, an earthquake that shatters their relationships, that buries them in grief, that forces them to rebuild their lives.
But so is each death in Africa.
In Haiti, I understand, the current level of famine is so acute that some people literally eat mud, to ease the torment of their empty stomachs. Most Haitians have intestinal parasites. In Haiti, modern hygiene is simply not possible for mot people; almost everyone lives with some level of recurring dysentery.
How must starving Haitians feel if they hear that hundreds of tons of suspect food will be destroyed, or reprocessed to feed animals, lest it cause another case of diarrhea?
I say that without any criticism of Maple Leaf Foods. They may have been the source of the listeria. But they have, in my opinion, responded admirably.
Even before listeriosis was officially traced to their plant, Maple Leaf voluntarily recalled more than 200 brands of ready-to-eat deli meats and sandwiches. They have not blamed to anyone else; they have not offered alibis.
Would that all corporations acted as forthrightly.
Every unnecessary death is a tragedy, of course. But we would do better to expend our energies, and emotions, on the real killers here at home and around the world, instead of acting like Chicken Little over a comparatively minor crisis.
Despite the media hysteria, the sky is not falling.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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