It is welcome news that a major immunization drive against polio is being launched in India, after a five-fold rise in the number of individuals, mostly children, contracting the crippling disease. It is the plan of the UN’s World Health Organization to eradicate polio worldwide within the next two years. The countries besides India where it is still considered endemic are Nigeria, Niger, Egypt, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Ethiopia and Angola.
Polio was once a global scourge. Its eradication in the developed world over the last 50 years has been a considerable achievement and it is right that every child should be protected from the disease’s catastrophic effects. Yet the success of the medical world against polio may, in time, come to represent a defeat rather than a victory.
Consider other conditions such as tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. The former was pretty effectively eradicated from Europe and North America, largely by inoculation. Malaria meanwhile was generally attacked in its heartlands, the malarial swamps that bred the mosquitoes which carried and spread the infection. Yet in the case of neither disease was the eradication campaign completed. TB in particular, a disease that breeds on poverty and bad hygiene, survived in the Third World. As a result, it is now returning to the wealthy developed world, in a new strain which appears to be unaffected by inoculation. Just as seriously, this new TB is resistant to the antibiotics that drove out its predecessors and needs a cocktail of stronger drugs to defeat it.
The tenacity and stubbornness of these conditions should give science pause for thought. There is an argument that disease exists in order to ensure that the majority of people, plants or animals is healthy. Light cannot exist without darkness, nor silence without sound. Evidence for this possibly essential balance comes from the modern food industry in the developed world. Hygiene regulations, often informed by a hysterical consumer fear of impurities, effectively mean that the majority of foodstuffs is sold entirely sterile, cleansed of all bugs and bacteria. The only exceptions are medicinal yoghurts, which ironically are sold precisely because they contain bugs, but “beneficial” bugs for people’s digestive system. In Europe it seems that even cheeses are under attack with a Brussels food police taking an alarming interest in the high bacteriological content of many world famous French cheeses.
What the medical yoghurts recognize is that it is simply not healthy to have stomachs and intestinal systems that are as sterile as operating theaters. Food manufacturers may welcome sterile products because they can be produced at consistent quality with longer shelf lives, but there is growing evidence that it is simply unhealthy not to ingest a regular dose of bugs, both apparently malign and beneficial.
In the developed world, medicine is demanded as a right and food as a fashion item, in which faddish diet plays an increasingly obtrusive role. In the Third World, medicine is hoped for and food is all too often a bare survival necessity. The irony may be that, famine aside, the Third World may be actually living healthier lives in their diseased poverty than the rich in their bug-free, sterile and, therefore, increasingly vulnerable world.
