NDM-1, A Global Time Bomb
April 26, 2011, Submitted by: Ken Tweet
“Doctors at the world’s largest gathering of infectious disease experts recently described NDM-1 as a global time bomb that could lead the world into a post-antibiotic era.”
A 25-Apr-2011 report from ‘The Age‘, an Australian online media and newspaper outlet, says AUSTRALIAN hospitals have been urged to start screening patients for a deadly new superbug that could herald the decline of antibiotics as an effective medicine.
A new bacterial gene, known as NDM-1, has an unprecedented level of resistance to nearly all antibiotics, including carbapenems, one of the last-resort antibiotics for serious infections.
”It is getting worse. The efficacy of antibiotics has been declining for the last 30 years, and in some cases, we are getting to the point where some micro-organisms are essentially untreatable by antibiotics. That number and the proportion of those organisms is only going to increase with time,” said Professor Stokes, past president of the Australian Society for Microbiology.
Elizabeth Harry, a microbiologist at the University of Technology in Sydney said ”It will be like going back to war times when many people died from infections. It wasn’t the injuries, it was the infections that killed them. I don’t think everyone gets that. It would be a bit like not having anesthetics.”
The increasing publicity of the NDM-1 issue may be reflecting renewed urgency from the medical community, an urgency that likely represents an increasing risk to our modern day medicine and ‘way-of-life’. Relative to our timeline as humans on this planet, antibiotics have only been with us for a very short time – and already we are facing their potential ineffectiveness.
It was not that long ago when people commonly died from infection, significantly reducing our average life expectancy. Having once won the battle in the war against deadly infection, it seems we may now be in retreat, while the invisible enemy tries to regain control. Have we gone past the peak of life expectancy? Is our own over-consumption (i.e. misuse of antibiotics) beginning to cause a decline, a dimmer outlook for our future?
Probably, yes. What can we do about it? Becoming aware of the risks is the first step. Realizing that we are vulnerable and not invincible. Become more responsible for the things that we do. Plan ahead for a world in which we may not have all of the same cures that we do today. Nature has a way of ‘getting us back’ from time to time…
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It seems like bacteria and other plagues are adapting to anything that people can throw at them. The real solution is to prevent something like this nightmare bug from ever forming in the firstplace. Sanitation and the clean-up of filth and disease has always been the answer throughout history. We are taught from a very early age to wash our hands and it is as simple as this, wash the pathogen away and do not allow it to infect you to begin with.
As long as these cess pits in these third, fourth, and fifth world countries are not properly cleaned up, deadly germs are going to form and become more virulent in comparison to just how dirty it is. As long as population continues to grow exponentially in these countries these slums are going to get worse and worse and so are the deadly panademics. Some India city will probably be the initial focal point of some doomsday virus and or bacteria because it has all the perfect breeding grounds for some biological horror. Very hot wet humid conditions most of the year and piles of wastes and raw sewage that any germ would be in heaven living in.
It may seem heartless to be critical of these very poor countries, but out of control birth rates have caused this problem, period. Why should people in countries that are clean and practice responsible birth control and go to such extensive means of staying healthy have to suffer from some hideous sickness because of those that cannot contain their population to manageable levels?
The answer is something that most people do not like to discuss and this is controlling the overpopulation problem. This starts first with a lot of money to introduce free or get payed sterilization programs all over the planet. Then comes a lot more money and a whole lot of disinfectant to remove and totally clean these hovels in every large city. I know this is not going to happen and I personally feel that the human species is eventually going to go through some terrible plague that massively thins the population. It has happened before and it will happen again because history repeats itself to those that don’t learn from it. Humans might even this time become extinct from something so awful that modern technology has no answer to stop it.
This is why sites like Modern Survival are so important because Ken and those that contribute to this site are going to have sensible suggestions that probably will work well to at least attempt to survive the next global pandemic the best we can.
The NDM-1 virus is prevalent in Indian water supplies. This is a very controversial subject – especially where the Indian government is concerned. There was some talk of screening Dehli and other Indian residents when touring western countries – extremely controversial.
The problem is not that some organisms are bad or good. The problem is our relation with them. In a healthy individual, exposure will result in resistence. Some will have better addaped resistence due to prior exposure in the earlier generations.
Populations that have suffered under the plague have better chances to HIV for example.
This is all about equilibrium.
We, humans, as a organism behave like a sickness to the earth. Maybe these resistant bugs are part of the earths own resistance?
NDM-1 is not a virus. It’s a genetic element transferred between bacteria.
Correct – as is pointed out in the following related article… http://modernsurvivalblog.com/pandemic/ndm-1-bacteria-superbug-may-be-resistant-to-all-known-antibiotics/