Adonis Diaries

Our immune system and Fish: From “A short history of nearly evrything” by Bill BrysonI

Is our immune system still functioning properly?

In 1952, penicillin was fully effective against all strains of staphylococcus bacteria.  The US surgeon-general, William Stewart declared: “The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases. We have basically wiped out infection in the USA”.

Remarkably, 70% of the antibiotics used in the developed world are given to farm animals in stock feed, to promote growth or as a precaution against infection. The bacteria mutated and evolved a resistance to antibiotics and 90% of the strains developed immunity to penicillin. Only one type of antibiotics called vanomyncin remained effective.

In 1997, vanomycin failed to check a new strain.  The pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given the world an entirely new antibiotic since the1970s, preferring to produce a whole gamut of antidepressants that people take everyday for ever.

There is a process of discovery that many ailments may be bacterial in origin such as ulcers, heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several mental disorders, many cancers, and even obesity.

On Fish abundance

Fish is no longer that abundant in the surface seas. According to one estimate, there could be as many as 30 million species living in the sea, most are undiscovered. However, the world’s seas are not uniformly bounteous.

For example, Australia has the longest coastline of 36,735 kilometers, yet it is not a fishing nation because it has no fish for lack of nutrients from the rivers that do not carry much there. In the 1970s, Australia and New Zealand discovered vast shoals of “orange roughy” at a depth of 800 meters.  The fishing fleet was hauling 40,000 tons of roughy a year.  In no time the roughy was disappearing because this type of fish was leading an unhurried lifestyle, spawning once in a lifetime, for the water was resource-poor.

Sharks are captured, the fin tail sliced off, and then dumped back to die: In the Far East, the kilo of fins is sold for $110 and a bowl of shark-fin soup retail for $100 in Tokyo.

As of 195, some 37,000 industrial-sized fishing ships, plus about a million boats, were taking twice as many fish as they had 25 years earlier.  A quarter of a fishing net contains “by-catch” that has to be dumped back, mostly dead, because they are too small or the wrong type. For every kilo of shrimp harvested, about 4 kilo of fish is destroyed.  Cod and halibut are almost extinct off the northeast coast of America.

A single lobster in the catch used to weight 9 kilos and they don’t weight one kilo presently: lobster can live up to 70 years but is not given time to mature.  Fishermen are reduced to fishing the hideous hagfish; these days, “fish” is whatever is left.  It seems that the crab-eater seals are the mammal species of large size that are the most numerous after humans and they live on the pack ice around Antarctica.