Drug resistant microbes are getting bred by Indian pharma factories [corrected from "pharmacies"] through their own carelessness [1]. I think it's high time WHO or some such agency got more powers to penalize the perpetrators beyond the jurisdiction of the country. If these bugs start in one place, people on the other side of the globe get affected quickly too. At the moment, it seems that the best the west can do is not buy from factories that pollute. But this measure is insufficient.
The article was about fungal infections, not bacterial infections. In both cases the amount of both antibiotics and anti-fungals used by humans is small relative to their use in agriculture. That may be an easier place to start, although it doesn't preclude sanction against whatever bad practices are described in your linked video (didn't watch).
The video is about effluents form the pharma industry. The scale dwarfs any abuse by both human patients and animal farming. I have modified my comment above because I had used the wrong word.
The only effective way to reduce use of anti-fungals in agriculture is to develop new resistant varieties of plants, but that is sadly blocked by people unreasonably fearing gmo.
There was a big scandal a few years back, with a compounding pharmacy I think was in the northeastern US, which had some issue where they were contaminating medication with mold. It was being injected into patients, who were then having very diverse and horrible problems over time.
Boycotting Indian manufactured medication is probably neither feasible nor a solution. Nuances of regulation matter.
I remember a horror story about how patients would say their psych meds didn't work. Because the patients were, you know, mentally ill, nobody took it seriously. It turned out the FDA had approved the drug based on testing only some of the dosages, and the one that was problematic was not dissolving like it was supposed to.
In India, Mucormycosis, a rare fungal infection is being seen in patients recovering from Covid-19. It has been declared an epidemic I believe. Doctors believe that high blood sugar and an indiscriminate use of steroids to reduce Covid-19 inflammation is linked to the spread.
This isn't surprising to me. In India a lot of state governments are sending covid pill packs to citizens which really don't do anything for covid and contain things like hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, zinc, other steroids, and other blood thinners.
even the AIMS protocol doesn't recommend against drugs and techniques that the rest of the world has rejected almost a year ago. My partner treats covid in the US and has been doing consults to patients in India. Most of their work is telling patients to ignore the pills their doctors or government has been sending, although they rarely listen.
I wouldn't be surprised if a large chunk of the covid negative or mild covid population is on steroids.
Systemic corticosteroids are strongly recommended for patients by WHO. I see from here https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/remdesi...
that also budesonide is recommended for patients with mild symptoms and the usage of is backed up by recent studies.
I do not think that the problem is steroid usage by itself but depressing lack of even basic hygiene even in hospitals.
PS. Blood thinning is standard procedure in COVID-19 care for many hospitals, dunno how reasonable at home without any tests. Remdesivir is injected, I do not believe that it is distributed. Perhaps you meant ivermectin?
Systemic corticosteroids are not prescribed for patients with mild symptoms at home in America. Basically you get acetaminophen and are asked to quarantine similar to a cold. Budesonide is not recommended in the case either. I am talking about US standards, but I think EU and UK doctors would also agree with me.
Hygiene in hospital is definitely a possibly other issue.
At least by US standards, blood thinners are not a reasonable procedure for mild symptoms either. In general India is being extremely aggress with using prescriptions, at least compared to the west and Eastern Asia. There are many examples where AIMS protocol and Indian standard guidance is contrary to WHO, NHS, and CDC guidance.
Ebola and H1N1 were both epidemics. The former wasn't a pandemic and the latter didn't kill that many people in hindsight, but they were most definitely epidemic in large communities.
With the disclaimer that I'm not an expert: Also, ebola didn't just fizzle out of its own accord, its spread was halted by a concerted, and brave, effort. Medics died fighting that epidemic. I suspect it could have been orders of magnitude more lethal had it been handled less effectively.
> Not all of our vulnerability is the fault of medicine preserving life so successfully. Other human actions have opened more doors between the fungal world and our own. We clear land for crops and settlement and perturb what were stable balances between fungi and their hosts. We carry goods and animals across the world, and fungi hitchhike on them. We drench crops in fungicides and enhance the resistance of organisms residing nearby. We take actions that warm the climate, and fungi adapt, narrowing the gap between their preferred temperature and ours that protected us for so long.
> That mutual coexistence is now tipping out of balance. Fungi are surging beyond the climate zones they long lived in, adapting to environments that would once have been inimical, learning new behaviors that let them leap between species in novel ways. While executing those maneuvers, they are becoming more successful pathogens, threatening human health in ways—and numbers—they could not achieve before.
Still early stages, but signs point to fungi becoming deadlier.
It's a bit of creative writing, mostly. Fungi evolve, that's what they do. And they evolve very rapidly. They also have great staying power, with spores that have covered every square millimeter of the earth pretty much for the entire history of life on earth. You're breathing some in right now.
Animals evolved warm-bloodedness partly to improve resistance to environmental fungi. Meanwhile, insects (bees, ants, others) actually farm fungi as part of their food and for defense. This all points to a really profound and fundamental fact: We have been co-existing with fungi every second of every person's entire lives.
If fungi are killing more people, it's because people have changed, not the fungi.
>Animals evolved warm-bloodedness partly to improve resistance to environmental fungi
I was listening to a podcast recently that discussed how human average body temperature has been declining in recent years while heat tolerance of fungi has been rising (thanks to the climate). The result is that our bodies are less capable of preventing fungal infections through heat and fungi can be pretty deadly if unchecked.
Here is my hypothesis. Our body temperature is expensive and evolutionary not 'stable'. In the past, it would make sense that in environments with lower bacterial threats, the group would select for lower body temperature in order to preserve energy.
In order to do that, individuals with too low a body temperature would be removed from the group due to infections. This would create a balanced system between body temperature (energy expenditure) and bacterial immunity.
With the development of antibiotics, this changed. The previous bottom of the group is not culled anymore, removing the barrier of the imbalance. Therefore, the group is 'safely' selecting for lower body temperatures.
The theory is that in wealthy countries with good public health, there's less need to maintain a high body temperature to fend off threats. The show said that human body temperature "has been steadily declining for decades at a rate of, like, .05 degrees Fahrenheit per decade." (though not in less developed countries)...average is said to be more like 97.5 degrees.
Right; but they've been evolving rapidly the entire time. So they're still doing what they've always done. If the environment is changing, and people are changing, and that's causing us to be vulnerable to conditions we weren't previously vulnerable to, then that's a problem caused by people changing. These stories look for a villain, and seem to end up villainizing the fungus, which is good for sensationalism but not very useful for understanding what is actually happening.
You should be much more concerned about bacteria developing antibiotic resistance. While fungi are undoubtedly evolving quickly and may one day pose a risk to us, the devil we know is already working very quickly to overwhelm our best medications. And we know that without those medications millions per year will die.
But I'm not that worried about antibiotic resistance, because there are many ways to skin a cat. MRNA vaccines, bacteriophages, targeted antibiotics, nanotech, etc all offer us ways to break free from the natural arms race that we're in right now.
The issue with fungi is that we have so litte efficient medication. What little we do have is slowly being render useless by its overuse in agriculture.
Love it, the mans brain is made of solid gold dogecoin tesla NFTs as always.
But these shorter Adam Curtis vids have always confused me a bit. Are they just parts of longer documentaries that Ive never come across or does he sometimes produce these things to be under 10min? Were these aired on the BBC in between other programs or something?
>Infectious disease is one area where fear of the unknown is rational. We don't just need to defend against existing diseases, but also diseases yet to emerge.
Sage wisdom shared a mere year before the covid outbreak.
But really the potential of prions is so bad if they could realise it we’d already be done for, they’d be a homogenising swarm.
Fungi though, fungi already do a lot, and they’re as ridiculously varied and flexible as they’ve been neglected. The next zoonotic threat being fungi makes a lot of sense, and it sounds rather bad.
prions are one of those things I wish I never started reading about. It's like reading about Lovecraftian gods when you know there's nothing that could protect you if it hits you.
Fungi can be very potent. There is a form of fungi called Cordyceps that invade the brains of ants and change their behavior in a way that increases its spread. Here's a clip by Attenborough explaining it best:
Mammals are much more resistant to parasites though - we have better immune systems, a high internal body temperature, and don't use pheromones. All of those are essentially there to prevent fungi from mind controlling us.
And meteors, and murder hornets, and rip current, and sun flares, and cholesterol, and lightnings, tornados, straight-line wind, fast food, microwaves... and ... and ...
"Every man dies. Not every man really lives" - William Wallace
One can do both. Even an uneducated poor grunt like me can simultaneously worry about novel diseases and the countless corrupt machinations at play the world over.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9EJuAU2Un4