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Title: Natural Born Killers
Author: Sky Hiatt
Date: Summer/Fall 2006
Language: en
Topics: green anarchy, Green Anarchy #23, civilization, disease, biology, health, science
Source: Retrieved on 27 August 2018 from http://greenanarchy.anarchyplanet.org/files/2012/05/greenanarchy23.pdf
Notes: from Green Anarchy #23, Summer/Fall 2006

Sky Hiatt

Natural Born Killers

They say we are living through the 6th great mass extinction of

non-human species here on Earth. As any calamity shifts the influence of

power, that also means we’ve entered the 6th great age of the microbes.

Conditions fatal to slowly evolving, relatively new species, such as our

own, will prove beneficial, even ideal, for rapidly mutating ancient

species such as virus and bacteria. These are the Earth’s first and

oldest living things, shadowed in Precambrian fossils 3.2 billion years

old. Before them, there was nothing. For a billion years after them,

there was nothing else. They prepared the Earth for all later life, but

we tend to think of them as elemental things, sadly denied the dignity

of consciousness. But when the calculus of cognition melts away, and the

body assumes its most vulnerable form, the laws of organic order weaken.

In fact, for bacteria and viruses, most laws of biology exist only to be

broken.

“The war against infectious disease has been won,” the U.S. Surgeon

General famously proclaimed in 1969. That was before the

passive-aggressive strategies of microbes threatened wonder-drugs and

the utopia they hinted at. Medical professionals also predicted the end

of specific diseases, such as T.B., which killed one million people a

year in 1908 and today is the second leading cause of death worldwide,

killing three million annually. In the U.S., tuberculosis infections

increased 20% in six years between 1985 and 1991. The war has not been

won. When penicillin first saved a human life in 1942, an attending

doctor conmented later, “Nothing in my whole experience has ever

compared to that.” Another witness was equally stunned. “It was a truth

so gratifying as to be at times almost unbelievable.” The age of

antibiotics was begun. In Why We Get Sick, authors Randolph Ness and

George Williams refer to antibiotics as “Perhaps the greatest medical

advance of the century and one of the greatest of all time...” Death was

defeated. Science reigned. Within three years, resistances appeared. The

microbes quickly learned how to disable the new drug therapies. In 1998,

for the first time in 56 years, a hospital patient died of an

untreatable staphylococcus infection. Today 90% of hospital staph

infections have resistances to all antibiotics but one—vancomycin— also

known as the drug of last resort. The golden age is over.

Vancomycin resistant Enteroccocus. VISA—vancomycin intermediate

resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The phenomenon has been

institutionalized. New areas of specialization are appearing. Summits

are held to focus on a problem that could push us into the

“post-antibiotic age.” To avert a crisis, they will have to alter the

course of contemporary reality. As long ago as 1996, the World Health

Organization issued warnings of “a major plague for the coming century.”

Truthfully, plague already sounds major to me. WHO narrowed the

potential microbial culprits to T.B., cholera, AIDS, diphtheria, polio.

If the crisis cannot be averted, infectious disease will continue

spreading, pandemics will rise, every surgical procedure will be as

dangerous as it was in 1920 and elective surgery will be unheard of. In

The Dancing Matrix; Voyages Along the Viral Frontier Robin Henig

summarizes, “The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance of

the planet, is the virus.”

Despite the notoriety, viruses are absent from taxonomic inventories.

They aren’t alive exactly, just elemental protein strings that need a

host cell to replicate. Maybe that’s why they don’t know fear, don’t get

tired or confused, or angry or impatient. Maybe that’s why they’re not

programmed to give up, cede or surrender. According to researcher Glenn

Morris, “These are bugs that spend every second of their lives trying to

protect themselves and replicate.” There is no down time. Their cousins,

the bacteria, can exist breathing sulfide, oxygen, methane, ammonia,

carbon monoxide, inert nitrogen. They can live comfortably in boiling

water, acid, ice, and desert dryness, suspending life’s functions

waiting for a drop of rain.

Things were different on Earth when viruses and bacteria appeared. Times

were hard. The young planet was an unreceptive, lethal environment,

possibly satisfied to smolder forever as molten rock devoid of life. It

was not necessarily guaranteed that species would appear at all, or

survive. Any form of life, in that world, would have to be inconceivably

resilient. They would have to be almost indestructible.

Compared to the Precambrian, civilization has been a cornucopia for

them. Everything we do threatens us and favors them. Global warming,

colonialism, chronic change, pollution, cities, ozone depletion,

refugees, poverty, prostitution, wealth, war, dams, homelessness,

prisons, prison camps, drug-addiction, animal-based agriculture, garbage

dumps, irrigation. “The scale of disease associated with irrigation is

massive,” writes Sandra Postel in The Last Oasis. Hot water systems,

humidifiers, air-conditioning. Legionaires (X) Disease started in the

A/C of a conference center and is now a threat worldwide. Microbes favor

the tepid artificial ponds of modernity. Soil bacteria, we now know, do

well in high-tech cooling equipment. International trade and travel?

Paul Reston writes about this in The Hot Zone. A “virus from the

rainforest is now within 24 hours of every city on Earth–Paris, Rome,

New York – wherever planes fly.” Bacteriologists call it viral

trafficking along the viral highway. Laurie Garrett calls it the

globalization of microbes. Researchers and doctors who gather to

consider the intensifying health crises, are going to have to think

about all these things. Maybe eventually they’ll realize civilization is

a disease machine.

Our manifest imperialist destiny has liberated bacteria whose lethal

threats were once held off by acquired ecosystems immunities. Wildness

once offered protection to everyone. In stable times, one species became

extinct and one appeared, on the average, every million years. During

those times, species in each bioregion grew habituated to one another.

Compatibility was the first law and it has never been rescinded.

Pathogens and hosts once lived together. Auto-immune harmony prevailed.

If anything moved out of the protective eco-cluster, it risked death

head-on. If new organisms came in, most were soon exterminated. For

every 1000 life forms that appeared on Earth only one survived.

Stability, continuity, and permanence have always been the laws of being

alive. Of course, we’ve long suspected the bugs and germs would thrive

in a post-apocalyptic world. But, did we see them as the apocalypse? If

an airborne transmissible form of AIDS appears, according to Arno

Karlen, we’re probably doomed. All the virus has to do is migrate to the

lungs, where its deadly properties can be spread by merely breathing on

someone. There are no laws of biology preventing that from happening.

Certainly civilizations existed long before antibiotics and many

survived to modern times. Of those that failed, they failed for

different reasons, in relative isolation in their bioregion. It took

technology to break down the protective limits, so that each threat to

one becomes a threat to all. Before tourism, sailing ships and

airplanes, if past cultures encountered novel pathogens, the damage

would be localized. As today’s societies are all connected, civilization

as a whole is threatened. The global village is hostile and

uncompromising. Errors are “magnified worldwide.” While humans focus on

oil wars, marauding weather systems, mutant frogs, and world hunger, the

microbes persevere in their inexorable conquest of the planet.

The Yellow Fever mosquito vectors usually live in forest and jungle

canopies preying on monkeys and small animals. When they cut the trees,

the mosquitoes came down. Now they share their microbes with humans.

Along the way they developed resistances to DDT. If you burn the forests

of Borneo, the fruit bats may turn to nearby farms and pass on pathogens

to the livestock, which may pass them on to farmers. If you kill all the

gazelle, the tsetse fly will go elsewhere. If you build subdivisions in

the eastern U.S. forests, deer will be pressed nearer to your yards and

homes. Deer ticks may be transferred to pets, which may pass on Lyme

Disease to humans. As humans overpopulate, the more the microbes focus

on us. We’re depleting their former victim populations, while offering

human hosts with virgin immune systems to prey upon. At present, there

are 5,000 vials of exotic viruses from the Amazon rain forest

freeze-dried in a Yale lab waiting for someone to take a look at them.

This is only a fraction of the populations of bacteria and viruses

waiting in their equanimity zones for us to stumble upon them. Consider

the compulsiveness with which scientists take care to insure no alien

bacteria are brought back to Earth from deep space missions, and the

estimated two million bacteria of earthly origin still waiting to be

encountered, studied and characterized. The potentially catastrophic

hazard was here all along. “If we had discovered them on Mars,” write

Sagan and Margulis, “they would have received the attention they

deserve.” Every time we enter a virgin forest to destroy it or exploit

it, we are stepping from a lunar landing module onto alien terrain.

Forests may passively allow their destruction, seas die quietly, and

mammals, fish, and birds fade into extinction. Bacteria are not like

that. They redefine the paradigm of life into rigid dictums coded in the

chemical combinations and random genetic variations of their own design.

We followed their rules for eons, from Australopithecus to the age of

iron. But, the present age has deterred us. So much so, that the end of

the fossil fuel era, a new ice age triggered by global warming,

overpopulation, water wars—all of this is distant future history.

According to the Earth’s oldest living things, civilization will never

make it that far.

What scientists now understand about bacteria is, you can kill them, but

you can never kill them all. Among the teeming millions found in the

head of a pin, genetic variety naturally exists. The antibiotics select

for those few by killing all the rest. New antibiotics have to be

synthesized for these survivors, and so it goes. By now, worldwide

multiple drug-resistant (MDR) bacteria are returning and Old-World

diseases are on the rise. The diseases of yesterday? Except for

smallpox, there is no such thing. Most are returning. Cholera—there are

now 139 strains on record. Measles, gonorrhea, plague, typhus, T.B.,

malaria. diphtheria, yellow fever, dengue fever, scarlet fever—the

old-fashioned strain was wiped out, now a new, heartier version has

returned and killed. Rheumatic fever, the black death, dysentery.

Leprosy has evolved untreatable new strains. Syphillis infects more

people today than in the l950’s. Emerging diseases are also on the rise:

Marburg, Ebola, AIDS, HSE, Kuru, CJD, Lassa fever, West Nile virus.

Wasting diseases, lingering diseases. In Health, Illness, and the Social

Body, Fruend and McGuire write, “Chronic, degenerative diseases increase

as populations move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to the

industrial community.” This works well for pharmaceuticals, who prefer

to manufacture drugs that will be taken for forty years, rather than

those that will be used episodically, rarely or never.

In The Future in Plain Sight, Eugene Linden refers to cities as, “The

ideal nurseries for incubating more virulent forms of disease.” They are

the contemporary plague zones. The world’s first sedentary

agriculturalists, and later colonialists, pulled whole populations off

ancestral lands, into growing urban centers. Arno Karlen calls cities

“superherds of humans,” where pathogens can intermingle and interbreed

freely. Sick building syndrome is a modern problem. Synthetic compounds

leach into the recirculated ‘canned air’ of offices cut off from the

outside atmosphere. Germs revel in it. The inner city is a third world

anti-oasis, where outbreaks of MDR T.B. are difficult to eradicate. The

homeless often fail to complete the lengthy treatments necessary. Cities

breached ancient health parameters and gave rise to ‘crowd diseases,’

those infectious marauders in need of constant new victims to sustain

them. This is the “threshold effect” by which increasingly urbanized

populations reach critical levels, permitting new infections to spread

continuously. Measles, mumps, colds, flu, smallpox—all need large

populations, endless supplies of new victims lacking tolerances or

immunities, to sustain them. All organisms in a given cluster would have

either died out or developed immunities. In primal times, such diseases

and the epidemics they fostered were impossibilities.

The remaining threats of modernity? Global warming sends disease vectors

migrating northward prospering in the warmer climates reminiscent of the

ancient warmer Earth. Ozone depletion may be inconsequential to bacteria

since they created the Earth’s oxygen, which the Sun converted to ozone,

but not before the microbes became resistant to the effects of

radiation. Poverty offers microbes millions of compromised hosts as

helpless victims. As the ranks of the poor increase worldwide, disease

spreads among them. Refugees, now 20 million strong globally, are

distressed human super-herds spreading disease among them. AIDS forms a

deadly triad with syphilis and tuberculosis. Suppressed immunities are

ideal sanctuaries where old diseases are reborn as unconquerable

adversaries, indifferent to our drugs and vast technologies.

Drug-addiction introduces reused needles – proficient disease vectors

standing in for mosquitoes, ticks, contaminated water.

War is a microbial nirvana zone. Favored elements are on hand

simultaneously: filth, open wounds, strangers thrown together in unknown

lands. “Four out of five fatalities in WWII were from infections, not

from the wounds,” write the Zimmermans in Killer Germs. In WWI, three

million died from typhus alone. The avian flu has recently (Feb, 15, 06)

moved into Africa, Greece, Italy, and Bulgaria. Birds will fly.

Epidemiologists are plotting the migration routes. The bird flu has also

entered Iraq. Maybe the smell of explosives will nudge it into that

final mutation allowing it to spread contagiously from human to human.

Then, returning American troops could effectively spread the disease

among us. In that case, there could be a reevaluation of their mission

there.

As civilization advanced, even food has served as a convenient disease

vector. The first proto-humans ate primarily plant food as evidenced by

grinding molars and the long intestine. Next, early humans began

scavenging meat killed by other animals. Third, came hunter-gatherer

status. Then, animal-based agriculture. And finally, factory farming.

Through the first stages, humans advanced beyond the tropics taking on

new diseases in exchange for the calories to feed the global population

expansion. Animal-based agriculture pressed humans into closer

association to other species, themselves now sedentary, accelerating the

incidence of disease crossover. We now know that all infectious diseases

come to us from animals. Sixty-five diseases from dogs—distemper in dogs

is caused by a virus that jumped to humans as measles. Thirty-five

diseases from horses including the common cold. Forty-six from sheep and

goats. One-hundred from birds including the quickly mutating avian flu

with a 50% fatality rate in humans so far. The flu pandemic of 1918 only

killed one in a thousand. Millions died. Of a potential modern avian flu

pandemic, author Laurie Garrett says the only thing she can think of

that would be worse would be nuclear war. Cholera, hantavirus, typhus

and various plagues, from rodents that have followed humans into their

urban sanctuary. There are 129 strains of cholera now on record—the

microbe is an opportunist lurking in the contaminated waters of the

third world. Forty-two diseases from pigs. Leprosy—from tanning water

buffalo hides. From monkeys we get Ebola, and Marburg—a disease so

lethal researchers risk their lives working on it. Fifty diseases from

cattle including T.B. and smallpox—the one bacteria science claims to

have wiped out.

Our relationship to animals has shaped the world, almost promising it

would become civilized. With the disease load from animal-based

agriculture, it was ordained the Europeans would defeat the New World

natives. Indigenous hunter-gatherers and gardeners had a more distant

relationship to animals, and so, few infectious diseases to share and no

immune tolerances to the conqueror’s microbial inventory. The pioneers

may not have really needed other weapons. It is said many villages were

decimated before the conquerors even reached them, as the microbes

spread ahead reshaping history. In Health and the Rise of Civilization,

Mark Nathan Cohen writes, “Meat is the most dangerous source of

food-borne infection.” Not only historic diseases, but also many

emerging infectious diseases are coming to us this way. It’s as though

each animal were a kingdom unto itself— a universe of alien bacteria

wrapped in skin. Carnivores have evolved tolerances to the kingdom

bodies of other beings. But, for humans, the hazards of eating meat have

helped push humans to their present level of socio-cultural

incompetence.

After decimating Indian populations, smallpox went on to become the only

disease science can take credit for wiping out. Vaccinations—disabled

versions of the virus, did the job. Vaccinations are not an invention of

the present, but have been around since ancient times. In those days,

however, humans were naturally exposed to nonlethal versions of the

microbe in their daily lives. Today, vaccinations— recently linked to

ADHD and autism—are dispensed in doctor’s offices setting up a

dependency so that, should regular vaccinations become unavailable for

any reason, those born after that time will not be protected against

future outbreaks. This matters because, although they’ve wiped out the

disease, smallpox isn’t really gone. Reserves are held in labs in Russia

and the U.S. as a safeguard to develop vaccines against potential

bio-terrorism. Some of these high-risk samples have already come up

missing. And estimates are that at least a dozen “rogue nations” harbor

illegal stocks of smallpox virus. This is not quite news. The U.S.

weaponized anthrax, as well as a form of botulism 10,000 times as

virulent as nerve gas. They were going to use it on Cuba, but changed

their minds. Eight ounces could have wiped out all humanity. Is it still

on the shelf? Who knows? Historically, biologic weapons treaties are

broken by everyone who signs them.

Workers in the field agree, “The potential for bio-terrorism is

limitless.” In Our Final Hour, Martin Reese writes, “Disaster could be

caused by someone who is merely incompetent rather than malign.”

Potential bio-terrorists may have already taken note that smallpox

vaccinations were discontinued in the U.S. in 1972, since, by then, more

people were dying from the vaccine than from the virus. So, if smallpox

were used as a weapon here, many Americans would be vulnerable. Maybe

the terrorists are just watching the clock. The longer they wait, the

larger the percentage of the population unprotected.

As we have seen, there are crucial limits to vaccines and antibiotics.

Prospects of longevity, however, have no doubt won more converts to

civilization than any other achievement of our times. Drug therapies

were maximized, the sick were cured, infectious disease quelled into

submission, life-spans soared. But those gains were artificial—an

unsustainable anomaly of the present. In fact, it has recently been

reported that for the first time in American history, the next

generation will have a shorter life-span than the present one [depending

on access to life-extending technologies].

Destabilizing adjacent ecosystems for the benefit of one species is

biocultural deficit spending. Anything deserving of acclaim cannot be

good for one species to the detriment of all the rest. Eventually the

debt comes due and your empire of domination will fall. All-out war on

Nature is not the pathway to health. Genuine gains must obey planetary

edict.

As far as records indicate, no age in history has ever spent so much

money on health and healing as the present one. No age has ever had to.

From Herb Growing for Health, by Donald Law.

In the 21st century, concentrated populations all share the same needle,

and are infected with the same disease. They share a pact of similar

destinies—the lethal injections of modernity. Fair trade means trading

in everything. Nikes, Pepsi, movies, new diseases, old diseases,

everything. The old illnesses are on the rise everywhere. New ones are

emerging everywhere. Antibiotic resistance is happening everywhere.

Infectious disease is up 20% in the last 20 years—not in the third

world, but in the U.S. Why haven’t the microbes taken over the Earth?

Well, haven’t you been listening?

The bad news is, our genetic memories have been erased. The black box of

civilization has disrupted the evolutionary health processes with an

array of medical armaments behind which we, barely evolving, wither and

atrophy. Natural health has been disrupted. Hard-won species gains have

been erased across a wide spectrum and we’ve regressed toward

immunological vulnerability. Our bodies can identify and attack one

million foreign proteins. But only if we are exposed to them. Science

doesn’t let that happen. Now we have “the Hygiene Hypothesis”, the

theory that our immune systems are so under-used they cannot respond

effectively to the world around us. We are left on our own to face the

challenge of recapturing robust, evolved immunities and the primal

health dynamic. Our ancestors had already paid for it in full. But the

bond has been broken.

What’s happening is, the old diseases initially declined through the use

of antibiotics. During that same time, the ‘diseases of civilization’

surfaced: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc. Then the

original diseases began reemerging, often in more virulent forms. And

now new infectious diseases, emerging diseases, are appearing,

superimposed on all the rest. That’s the path we’re on. But most

researchers continue looking for the real magic bullet. In some circles,

optimism persists. In his recent book Bioevolution, Michael Fumento

predicts that the future achievements of genetic engineering will

include the end of most diseases, increases in human life-span, higher

crop yields and soil fertility, restoration of the environment, the end

of malnutrition, plant diseases wiped out. In The Next 50 Years, John

Brockman writes “...we will almost certainly be able to produce

artificial immune systems that can counter both living viruses and

computer viruses.” Nanotechnology will “...provide habitats to protect

us from our own ecological misdemeanors...” James Watson of double helix

fame once said, “If biologists won’t play god, who will?” Apparently he

has followers: immortalists, transhumanists, cryonicists.

Could we ever stop the microbial masses in their tracks? Well, the laws

of probability are not on our side. We’ve put a man on the Moon.

Developed nuclear weaponry. If we could have stopped the microbes, it

seems as though, by now, we would have done it. No, this world will

never be healthy. Civilization lacks the innate qualities. It is

structurally flawed. No matter how secure we may feel in the antiseptic

isolation chamber of the present, no matter how many CAT scans, MRIs,

EKGs, or novel drugs we consume, it will not happen. “We are in an arms

race,” write the authors of The Killers Within. “Disarmament is not an

option.” This is a world in which streptomycin has become a nutrient to

the bacteria we are at war with.

The solution to our health crisis will not be discovered through the

lens of the electron-scanning microscope. To defeat the germs, we need

to lay down the weapons of technology, retreat into the forest and leave

the wreckage of civilization behind us. If we can live there in Nature,

in relatively small groups of closely aligned people committed to a

geographic domain, living as simply as possible, as primitively as

possible, living wild, without war, without agriculture, without

cities—if we can do that and disaster or upheaval doesn’t intervene,

myths of Earthly sanctuary are as close as they ever will be to coming

true. “Disease is life under changed conditions,” Florence Nightengale

said. “There are no specific diseases, only specific disease

conditions.”

In the closing paragraph of Viruses, Arnold Levine writes: “That special

relationship between host and parasite will continue to make human

beings—and all forms of life on Earth—what we are and what we will be.

It is important for us to know the rules.” I agree.

SOURCES:

The Antibiotic Paradox, by Stuart Levy M.D.

Beyond Antibiotics, by Schmidt, Smith and Schnort

Beyond Vancomycin, Science News, vol. 155, p. 268-269, Corinna Wu.

Bioevolution, by Michael Fumento

The Coming Plague, by Laurie Garrett

A Dancing Matrix— Voyages Along the Viral Frontier, by Robin Henig (x)

Deadly Feast, by R. Rhodes

The Future in Plain Sight, by Eugene Linden

Garden of Microbial Delights, by Sagan and Margulis

A Green History of the World, by Clive Ponting

Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jarred Diamond

Health, illness and the Social Body, by Peter E.S. Fruend and Meredith

B. McGuire

Health and the Rise of Civilization, by Mark Nathan Cohen

Herb Growing for Health, by Donald Law

The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston

Killer Germs, by David and Barry Zimmerman

The Killers Within, by Michael Shnayerson and Mark J. Plotkin

The Last Oasis, by Sandra Postel

Man and Microbes, by Arno Karlen

Mirage of Health, by René Dubos

Natural History Magazine, 2-99

The Next 50 Years, edited by John Brockman

Our Final Hour, by Martin Reese

Overkill, by Dr. Kimberly M. Thompson

Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer

Viruses, by Arnold Levine M.D.

The Virus Realm, by Paul D. Thompson

Why We Get Sick, by Randolph M. Ness M.D. and George C. Williams, Ph.D