Adonis Diaries

Is polio next to be eradicated? What disease was wipe-out anyway?

Melinda Gates spoke on TED (Technology, Education, and Design) and claimed that polio is 90% eradicated (kind of less than 2,000 cases last year).  She was apprehensive that the generous donors might be witnessing “polio fatigue”, and might be reluctant perusing donations after two decades of containing polio.

In India, a single case of polio generated the vaccination of 2 million kids in the region.  Ethiopia is witnessing a significant drop in infantile mortality rate because remote communities are training specialized nurses for vaccinating and delivering pregnant women.

Diseases like malaria, diarrhea, measles, tuberculosis, cholera, polio, and countless others banal diseases that have vaccines, or can be treated with antibiotics, are still rampant and killing everyday thousands of babies and adults in under-developed States, particularly, kids under 5 years of age.

For example, Cholera is back in force and threatening to spread in many neighboring States to Zimbabwe.  Mugabe of Zimbabwe refuses to step down as President and his State is suffering great famine, miseries, and the plague.  Thousands of people have contracted cholera and over 7,000 have already succumbed.   Cholera cannot be controlled; it could not be through the ages and current progress is not at a par with that plague.  Why?  Cholera has the capacity to mutate: an element of AND code new functions for the benefit of the bacteria, modifying its genome and increasing its adaptation to treatments or new antibiotics.

So far, medical research has not mapped out all the means of transmissions of Cholera.  It is possible that home pets, cats and dogs, carrying flea might be transmitters of the epidemic.  What is known is that older generations of antibiotics such as streptomycin, chloramohenicol, and tetracycline are increasingly inefficient against the bacteria of cholera.  The antibiotic based on fluoroquinolone might be of more effectiveness.

The best angle to analyze the topic of transmissible diseases to divide the diseases in three categories.  The first category represents the diseases that have effective and cheap vaccines and antibiotics.  The second category represents disease that require costly vaccines, expensive treatments, and common surgeries but can effectively cure.  The third category is reserved for diseases that have no cures but can be contained for several years until progress is achieved like AIDS and a few other cancerous cases.

For the third category, funds are allocated to the under-developed States, simply because the rich States need guinea pigs to experiment with treatments that are traumatic in their own communities.

The first category is the most promising for decreasing drastically the casualties at an affordable cost.  Basically, the vaccines and the prior generations of antibiotics have already covered the expense of experimentation, and have been a cash cow for many decades.  The main expense would be to train local nurses in remote communities, and university students in medicine, to administer vaccines and inexpensive antibiotics that are still effective.

The second category is not as urgent for the under-developed States as the funding and the structural organizations for eradicating the diseases in the first category.  There has been a mobilization in 1994 for creating a world bank for medicament and vaccines and a few States invested funds in that bank but there was lack of active pursuit for the long term.  All the health related branches in the UN such as UNICEF, OMS, PAM, FUND, Red Cross, and Red Crescent have been working on the field for many decades, but diseases are gaining the upper hand.

The scarcity of resources allocated to fighting disease in the under-developed States need to be restructured.  Priority should be given to diseases in category #1, before attacking effectively diseases in category number two.  At least, trained nurses and medical students would be ready to tackle more complex treatments.

You may read my article https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/the-under-developed-countries-are-plagued-with-common-diseases-any-resolutions/

Note 1:  A short history on Cholera or plague.

Bubonic plague has a long history, through the ages, to devastating more than a third of a population as it hits.  Cholera lands suddenly, kills for a short period and then disappear for no known reasons.  The best remedy was to flee as quickly, as far away as is possible and not to return any time soon.

The Jews in Judea were decimated during David.  The troops of the Assyrian Monarch Sanhareeb, putting siege to Jerusalem in 701 BC, suffered the plague. Greece and Athens in 430 BC was devastated by cholera as Sparta was laying siege to Athens. Ancient Rome was plagued.  Cholera hit Byzantium during Justinian for one century and traveled around the Mediterranean basin; Pope Pelage II succumbed to cholera in 590.

In 1346, the Mogul troops, laying siege to Caffa in Crimea, were plagued and they catapulted infested bodies over the rampart of Caffa.  The Genoa defenders fled Caffa and transmitted the plague to all Europe; Spain, Marseille, Paris, England are contaminated and then Russia ten years later. France lost over a third of its population and Spain as many if not worse.

Cholera crashed London in 1665.   The English monarch and his family had to pay a long visit to the French Monarch.  The plague subsided when fire engulfed the better parts of the poorer quarters of London in 1666.

The last time, before Zimbabwe, that cholera expressed its virulence was in 1894 in south east China.

History accounts shows that cholera was carried by the Mogul troops arriving from Mongolia and Central Asia. As they sweep into relatively humid regions then plague settles in during summertime. India, Iran, Iraq, and Syria suffered plague during the Mogul successive invasions. I cannot but figure out a few hypotheses.

Note 2:  Alexandre Yersin, a French physician and bacteriologist, discovered in 1894 that Cholera is a bacteria but he failed to come up with a curative serum. Yersin still believed that rodents (rats) are the main culprit for transmitting this disease.  Only in 1898 did Paul-Louis Simond confirmed that cholera is transmitted by flea that quit dead rats to other greener pastures by sucking blood elsewhere.  Rats are infected with cholera but they are not affected or transmit it because they rarely bite humans.  Once a man is afflicted with cholera then the main transmitter of the epidemics are men.

Cholera infects people but does not bloom in dry arid regions.  Cholera is virulent in humid regions and during the hot seasons. Could it be because people sweat profusely? Especially because people failed to wash or take bathes in older days?  Or is it that since sweat excretes most of the salt in the body then cholera has an ideal medium of less salty body fluids to flourish and concentrate during the ripe seasons?