Elsewhere the post Mental Rice Cakes pointed and laughed at "breathless announcements of climate effects by doom mongers". That guild, a self selected kind of anti-mensa, works in many related fields, and can always be found in close proximity to the word "unsustainable". See this press release for an example.

As people remake the world's landscapes, cutting forests, draining wetlands, building roads and dams, and pushing the margins of cities ever outward, infectious diseases are gaining new toeholds, cropping up in new places and new hosts, and posing an ever-increasing risk to human and animal health...

"Many of our current activities, primarily for economic development, have some major adverse health effects," says Jonathan A. Patz, the lead author of the report, and a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the department of population health sciences.

Indeed, a detailed understanding of the influence of human activities on the spread of pathogens, the report notes, is limited to only a few diseases. In the northeastern United States, for example, studies have documented that forest fragmentation, urban sprawl and the erosion of biodiversity have contributed significantly to the spread of Lyme disease.

Nonsense. The northeastern United States has grown ever more forested in the last 100 years as farms failed and the land reverted to forest. Urban sprawl is trivial in terms of human exposure to pathogens. After all, most people used to actually work in the woods and fields. Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases such as tick fever and Tularemia have always been part of life. What is even dumber though is suggesting that "cutting forests, draining wetlands, building roads and dams" increases disease. It is overwhelming the opposite as anyone who lives near a wetland (aka swamp) can attest. Development greatly reduces disease.

But the US example was just a leader for their true subject.

A more global example is the AIDS virus, which scientists think may have first infected "bush meat" hunters given access to Africa's tropical forests by the growing network of logging roads in the continent's interior. The disease subsequently spread by human contact and has become a global tragedy through the ability of humans to travel the world with relative ease.

In scope, the issue is broad, affecting nearly every corner of the globe. The causes are as varied as the human activities that create the opportunities for pathogens to thrive, spread geographically and invade new hosts. It involves well-known and pervasive pathogens such as the parasite that causes malaria, a disease that claims more than 1 million lives annually, to diseases like SARS that are relatively new and, so far, limited.

Human beings evolved eating "bush meat". Humans were not given access to Africa by development, humans come from Africa. Malaria is so ancient that there are human genetic defenses against it (sickle cell). The only point these experts make that is the least bit sensible is that human travel spreads disease and that's hardly news. Though disputed, it is widely held that "The French Disease" - or is that "The Venetian Disease", whatever, syphilis to you and me - was carried back to European sea ports by sailors returning from "the new world" in the 16th century. Poxy Europeans then spread it all over the world.

New diseases, such as SARS, evolve constantly. The killer flu following WWI is thought to have evolved among soldiers billeted in unsanitary conditions along with livestock, and was spread world wide when they came home from war. A new flu seems to evolve every year and as ever, human travel spreads it from port to port. Population growth increases the opportunity for diseases since they have an increased number of hosts. Modern travel technologies move more people faster and farther than ever. Travel has been democratized and not just for people. Disease germs are hardly the only phyla to travel with humans. Nearly every place in the world has species that evolved elsewhere.

But it is development that eliminated the French disease as a plague that affected so many, even or especially the wealthiest and horniest of Europeans, as it has smallpox, polio and many other old companions of humanity. There's a circularity where development reduces disease and infant mortality while increasing longevity, which in turn increases productivity and development. Population has grown because of reduced mortality. Fertility has been in decline for decades.

No matter what we do new diseases will evolve and spread through humanity as they always have and always will. There's no place to hide, no gods that will save us, no one to help us. We will have to help each other, in sickness and in health, as we always have done. In a way we can admire our inventive microbial enemies as we do their cousins that provide medicines and food for us. They were here first, there are more of them by weight and volume as well as number, and we couldn't live without them. They are in us as well as around us. We're all cousins in a very real sense. We literally owe our existence to diseases and a debt of eternal gratitude for having induced our ancestors to invent sex as the ultimate defensive weapon.

It really is their planet more than ours. They sicken and kill us without even trying. Consider these research discoveries.

Microscopic organisms that get their energy by inhaling metals in the ground play a key role in the arsenic poisoning of drinking water for millions of people in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, according to a new study.

Researchers hope that the finding will shed light on how the drinking water came to be so heavily laced with arsenic—and that, in turn, it is hoped, could yield a way to reduce the level of the toxin.

Cited by the World Health Organization as the "worst mass poisoning in human history," as many as several million wells in India and Bangladesh became contaminated with the poison in the early 1990s. The poisoning remains a grave threat to those who continue to drink and irrigate with the water today.

The arsenic poisoning was blamed on industrial pollution and activists immediately sued for stricter, anti-development regulation. But it's complicated.

"... while it is much worse in Bangladesh and West Bengal than elsewhere, more and more countries are identifying the problem—these include Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, and others where tube wells were installed to prevent diarrhea-related problems associated with surface-water use."

If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will. Pick your poison - diarrhea or arsenic? Both are microbial related problems. Stopping development won't stop the diseases. You can't go back and you can't stand still.

Plague, pestilence, famine and war have always been with us - especially in the long eons before much development took place. We can reduce disease and treat sufferers but not eliminate it once and for all. When we unpack the claims of these supposed experts who oppose development something morally repugnant is revealed. They know full well that development reduces disease, especially for the poorest such as those in Africa. Many, many more Africans die from Malaria than AIDS as well as a host of other diseases which could be greatly reduced by sanitary systems providing clean water and carrying away wastes. When they try to twist the facts, claiming that development increases disease rather than reducing it, their motives are suspect. They are guilty at the very least of insensitivity and negligence and there appears to be premeditation. In either case it is a grave moral failing as well as bad science.

» Arrested Development from Crumb Trail
..or an attempt at any rate that hasn't gone unchallenged at M&M. No matter what we do new diseases will evolve and spread through humanity as they always have and always will. There's no place to hide, no gods that will save us, no one to help us. We......[read more]
Tracked: July 2, 2004 05:14 PM