People are
doing more today than ever before in our history that is having a negative
impact on our environment. The most
worrisome effect of them all is the recent, rapid increase in the number of
emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.
Agriculture, land use and development, and mass globalization are all
playing significant roles in this recent trend.
Mad cow
disease, a form of spongiform encephalopathy, first appeared on the radar of
infectious disease in 1984. It is a
disease that is caused most often by the ingestion of a species’ own brain
matter, or, as was recently discovered, through the ingestion of infected
meal. The outbreak in the United Kingdom
of the 1980s was caused by the feeding to livestock ground up cattle brains,
instead of their regular diet of grains and grasses (Walters, 2003). It was later discovered that mad cow disease
was able to jump from dead livestock to those who ate infected meat, causing
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a disease affecting the nervous system ultimately
leading to death. Creutzfeldt-Jakob
causes dementia, memory loss, changes in personality, and hallucinations, and
eventually causes deteriorating motor functions before ending in death
(Wikipedia). By altering the natural
order of life, creating cannibals out of our livestock instead of allowing them
their natural diet of plant life, we are playing Russian roulette with
biology. The pathogens already exist
that can wreak great havoc on us and we are merely facilitating their growth,
mutation, and spread by operating against the grain of nature.
Along the
same lines of operating against nature is the issue of antibiotic
resistance. “Although some bacterial
strains may resist antibiotics naturally, most become resistant because of
human overuse of the drug.” (Walters, 2003)
The development of penicillin in the late 1920s was hailed as the
solution to the issue of bacterial disease.
However, over the next seventy years the cure-all drug that once helped
revolutionized the fight against infectious diseases would be used for
everything from colds to cancer causing bacterial evolution on a scale not seen
since the beginning of life on Earth.
Today we are at a point where with many of the prevalent diseases that
there exist or is the potential to exist a strain which could spread across the
world without cure. Hill notes in his Emerging Infectious Diseases that for
some diseases, “these antibiotics generally are administered as a cocktail”
(Hill, 2006). This problem can most
easily be seen, again, in the cattle industry and also in the poultry industry
where for decades antibiotics have been injected into animals living in tight
quarters with one another to prevent disease and promote quick growth. These combined animal feeding operations
(CAFOs for short) are cesspools of disease and filth. The overuse of antibiotics causes the
evolution of bacteria to be sped up magnitudes greater than before their
implementation, potentially putting us humans further behind the curve than
when we started the trend of antibiotic administration.
The first
globalization, the movement of people from tribes into civilizations, came with
it a great epidemic of disease. The
second globalization, of the 17th to 19th century, came
with the development of international trade and travel. The third globalization, which we are
currently in the middle of, came with the fall of the Soviet Empire in the
early nineties which enabled for people and goods to travel internationally,
across borders, without delay: In a single day a person can now travel from the
United States to Hong Kong and back again, whereas the same trip one hundred
years ago would have likely taken months and two hundred years ago years. “History tells us that along with
globalization come both disease and social disruption… After thousands of
generations, suddenly, in about five generations, human life was transformed”
(Hilts, 2005). Diseases now travel from
place to place at a rate unheard of one hundred years ago. Strains that would have never stood a chance
of meeting before international travel can do so at any time and possibly from
their chance meetings create the next superbug, ready to spread across the
Earth.
Over the
last one hundred years we have developed rapidly as a knowledgeable, wealthy,
and healthy species. Through our
knowledge, wealth, and health, we have created the technology to help us
advance (transportation, medicine, and the efficient use of goods being
key). While for the most part we have
done a good job continuing to progress forward, we are failing in the key areas
that affect our livelihood, our health.
We must use our great knowledge and wealth to the betterment of the
worlds health, because if the health of the human species fails, than our
wealth and knowledge is all attributed for not.
Works Cited
Hill, Stuart. 2006. Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Hilts, Phillip. 2005. Rx for Survival: Why We Must Rise to
the Global Health Challenge.
Walters, Mark. 2003. Six Modern Plagues and How We Are
Causing Them.
This article originally written December 15th, 2008 as a final paper for OU IPE 3913 - Human Health, Disease, and the Environment.
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