This diary is intended as a complementary posting written in response to Brain-Eating Amoebas and other Global Warming Threats. A. Siegel lays out a number of problems in a piece well worth reading. I'm doing a riff here on a particular set.
Looking at the history of HIV/AIDS is informative. It got rolling in America because of government indifference and the attitude that since it was 'only' striking sexual deviants and criminals it was no big concern for anyone else. Wrong!
It wasn't till blameless victims like Ryan White and others began to make the headlines that AIDS started to get real attention. At that we've been lucky.
HIV isn't highly contagious the way smallpox or the flu is. When it finally got noticed by the West it appeared in a place and at a time where medical science was able to respond. On the U.S. East Coast for example, having a large politically active at-risk population in NYC combined with city and state health departments with a long history of active public health campaigns plus all the hospitals and research facilities in the area certainly helped to advance the effort to deal with AIDS. If AIDS had arrived in the 1800s, it would have been a very different story.
We know how to prevent it now, we have drugs that can make it a mostly manageable chronic infection, but we're still lacking a vaccine. And trends are not good.
The increasingly likely future collapse of energy systems and the economies tied to them is a direct threat to the medical-scientific infrastructure that is our defense against emerging diseases. We already have an entrenched political culture that is rabidly anti-science. They are not alone either. Indeed we have a virulent infection in the body politic of people who are pathologically incapable of giving up their political agenda when it conflicts with honest attempts to deal with problems in the real world.
It's not just the total idiocy of abstinence only sexual education, faith-based initiatives, or covert advocacy of intelligent design. It's basic things like competent policy execution not getting done.
Last week, for example, the Washington Post reported that William R. Steiger, director of the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, suppressed the 2006 "Call to Action on Global Health" report of U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, which explained the connection of poverty to health and urged that attacking diseases become a major U.S. international commitment. Steiger, who has no credentials in the field, is the son of a former congressman who was Vice President Cheney's earliest patron, giving Cheney his first congressional job as a staff intern. At the White House's behest, Steiger acts as a micromanaging political commissar. His insistence on approving every single overseas appointee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left many of its posts empty. "Only 166 of the CDC's 304 overseas positions in 53 countries are filled," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in April. "At least 85 positions likely will remain unfilled until 2008." Such is the theory of the unitary executive in action.
emphasis added.
I started here by discussing HIV; A. Siegel brought up Brain Eating Amoebas; but there's plenty of other candidates waiting in the wings. Avian flu is on standby at the moment - people are watching and doing what they can to prepare. Heard about these others though? Remember Polio - it's still out there and ready for a comeback. Ebola turns out to be even trickier than we knew. Heard of Dengue Fever? It may be headed your way. Let's not forget mankind's old friend Tuberculosis - it's learned some new tricks.
There's no end of potential candidates to 'thin the herd' when talking about humans and health. It is perhaps beyond ironic that while a dedicated band of theocons are working hard to make America a Christian Nation, they've forgotten just how much fun things could get in the last Age of Faith.
In the year of the Lord 1348 there was a very great pestilence in the city and district of Florence. It was of such a fury and so tempestuous that in houses in which it took hold previously healthy servants who took care of the ill died of the same illness. Almost non of the ill survived past the fourth day. Neither physicians nor medicines were effective. Whether because these illnesses were previously unknown or because physicians had not previously studied them, there seemed to be no cure. There was such a fear that no one seemed to know what to do. When it took hold in a house it often happened that no one remained who had not died. And it was not just that men and women died, but even sentient animals died. Dogs, cats, chickens, oxen, donkeys sheep showed the same symptoms and died of the same disease. And almost none, or very few, who showed these symptoms, were cured.
So, what kind of scenario are we looking at here? Siegel has done an excellent job describing potential impacts on the biosphere. Let's postulate a future where:
- failure to develop sane energy policies and peak oil have severely damaged the world's economies and lowered standards of living.
- Medical and Science infrastructures are stressed by the financial disruptions, crippled by years of bad science policies, under attack by fundamentalists, and stretched to the limit.
- Global climate change causes rising sea levels, violent weather events, and disruption of the food supply with consequent famines.
- Large scale migrations begin as refugee populations seek places where they can find food, shelter, and survival.
- What climate change doesn't do, rising violence and warfare does - further increasing the numbers of displaced people.
- Paranoia about refugees (Thank you GOP!) leads to government crack downs, internment camps with horrible living conditions, and a population perpetually on the run trying to avoid the government.
Take all of the above, add in one or more of the diseases mentioned above (or even something totally new), and let simmer. Voilá - it's a recipe for global epidemics that will make the Spanish Flu look like a warm up. It will start with the poor and distressed, and spread. (Bonus points for readers who can name the political party/school of thought that has turned out to be really good at increasing the numbers of the poor and distressed.)
Think of it as the Malthusian solution to global climate change - ramp down the primary factor driving it: humans. It's going to be a bit hard on civilization and democracy, but it should work.