Spectre Of Black Death Returns

It's been called the 'post-antibiotic era', and its been threatening to happen for some time .... well it appears that its arrived now, or rather it seems that we are trembling on the cusp of that nightmare scenario.

Colistin Resistant Bacteria Now Here ...

 

In China, it appears that despite knowing the risks, the Communists encouraged the farmers to dose the millions of pigs (a staple food stuff), with anti-bacterial drugs such as Colistin, to boost pork production.

 
This practise has also occurred in other parts of the world such as Europe and North America, and now its reported that the inevitable has happened, and that a bacteria (dubbed the MCR-1 gene), is now able to shrug off doses of Colistin in both human patients and livestock, has appeared. 

 

This year in China a fifth of the animals tested, and 15% of raw meat samples have the new Colistin resistant bacteria, and its been identified in 16 human patients .... the Chinese have belatedly acted, but despite plans to ban Colistin for animals (a ban in any case, not likely to be carried out in provinces thousand of kilometres from Beijing)', this is possibly a case of 'too little, too late'.

While in Britain, it was reported in December that 'deadly superbugs,' immune to our most powerful antibiotics have been found in at least a dozen patients. This was discovered when a review of 24,000 lab samples identified these resistant bacteria. The report also stated that these resistant bacteria have also been traced to three pig farms, as well as imported chickens.

Apparently the new strain or mutation is such that it will also easily transfer to other bacterial versions, and this will happen very quickly. Once it occurs, the newly resistant variants will go around the globe. At that point the world as we have known it for the last 60 years, will cease to exist.

E-Coli and other such infections will be untreatable, and the era of world epidemics, such as we last saw just after the first world war (when a flu epidemic killed over 20 million), or in the middle ages (Cholera, Typhoid, Bubonic plague etc), will be back. Even common surgery and cancer treatments will become killers in themselves, as untreatable infections become a major risk for the most minor of injuries.

As if to prove the point, news outlets started reporting last September that a highly drug-resistant form of 'super-gonorrhoea' (as one of the main treatments has become useless against this new strain of the sexually transmitted infection), is spreading in the north of England ..... twelve cases have been confirmed in Leeds and a further four have been reported in Macclesfield, Oldham and Scunthorpe. The fear is that this sexually transmitted disease (STD) could very quickly become totally untreatable.

Professor Hugh Pennington of Aberdeen University said that "It is more bad news. For some patients it now means that they will need several drugs to tackle their infections - if any work at all." This gloomy view was echoed in the Lancet magazine, which has commented that the "implications are enormous", with doctors in future telling "increasing numbers of patients" that, 'Sorry, there is nothing I can do to cure your infection'.

Ring A Ring A Roses - Black Death Memories ....

This new public health decline, can now be firmly added to our 2050AD predictions for the 'end of the world as we know it' .... the four horsemen are saddling up in the stable yards, even as I finish writing this.