“5/02/2008, 5:11pm EST”
"This is the one we're afraid of." →
JoNel Alleccia, MSNBC:
Clostridium difficile (or C. diff) has long been a common, usually benign bug associated with simple, easily treated diarrhea in older patients in hospitals and nursing homes. About 3 percent of healthy adults harbor the bacteria with no problem. But overuse of antibiotics has allowed the germ to develop resistance in recent years, doctors said, creating the toxic new type that stumps traditional treatment.
“This is the one we’re scared of,” said Dr. Brian Koll, chief of infection control at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. …
The infection is caused when normal flora in the gut is disturbed, typically by antibiotics. About 90 percent of CDAD cases occur in patients who’ve used antibiotics recently, especially fluroquinolines such as the popular drug Cipro.
The resistance allows the C. diff bacteria to take over and flourish. Consequences can range from severe diarrhea to colitis and toxic megacolon, a condition that can lead to shock and death.
Humans are sometimes able to achieve relatively great understanding about small pictures of time and space. We have very little understanding of larger pictures. The “problems” we identify almost always qualify as near-term, or small-scope. Devoid of any broader context, the “problems” we attempt to “solve” are likewise near-term and limited in scope. Therefore, the “problems” we do “solve” are usually in kind.
It should come as no surprise then that our “solutions” are short-sighted at best. With such little understanding of anything beyond the local and the immediate, all the “solutions” — also proudly referred to as “advancements,” or “progress” — are a gamble against the future.
But we have no idea what we’re betting with. Our “greatest” past “solutions” — from irrigation to guns to fossil fuel-based electricity to dynamite to industrial chemicals to antibiotics to plastics to atom bombs to computers — have solved small-scope and short-term problems. They have also reverberated negatively throughout our world in ways we might and might not have reasonably foreseen. These negative consequences are amplified by the fact that our “progress” is almost always a means of furthering the expansion of an invasive species. (That invasive species is humanity, by the way.)
What we most certainly should understand by now is that, once we have “solved a problem,” it is not long before the consequences of our “solution” overshadow the original “problem” altogether. But if we should be seeing this, why do we usually fail?
The answer is clear: we are blinded by our long immersion in humanist ideology. The belief in a human ability to “solve problems” or “make the world a fundamentally better place” is both a central tenet of humanism and a complete joke. For example, the micro-evolution of once-benign bacteria into fearsome “superbugs” is the result of widespread antibiotic use. We know this. We also know that some bacteria are good. In fact, without bacteria, we would not be alive at all.
Yet we still produce and consume our antibacterial soaps, despite the knowledge that it isn’t any more effective than regular soap at cleansing. We still prescribe antibiotics that make it more difficult for individuals to heal in the future; cause other systemic health problems in individuals; and create virulent bacteria that will cause suffering in the future.
But hey, these antibiotic-resistant bacteria may not comprise a genuine problem at all. Perhaps they are a genuine solution?
Never leave home without it.
