Between that Russian plane being taken down by a soda
can bomb and the recent Paris attacks, travel is losing some of its appeal.
Last night, for instance, I was at a party talking to a friend who's retiring
soon. When asked about his plans, he said he'd love to visit Italy, where he
has some relatives. But not right now. "There's a lot to see right here in
the Pacific Northwest," he said. "And you don't have to fly to get there."
With less tourism comes less trade, and with less trade comes less growth
-- as if the already-overleveraged and sputtering global economy needed another
push towards the edge. See Container
freight rates plummet 70% in 3 weeks.
But while we were distracted by ISIS, something potentially even more serious
happened in, of all places, a Chinese pig farm:
(Washington Post) - In general, I do my best not to alarm you. But antibiotic
resistant bacteria are alarming -- and you should be afraid.
According to a study published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, a gene dubbed
MCR-1 is becoming more common in bacteria found in China. MCR-1 gives bacteria
the ability to resist antibiotics called polymyxins. These harsh antibiotics
are considered a last line of defense -- a treatment when bacteria have shown
resistance to everything else. But with MCR-1 in tow, bacteria can thwart
our most aggressive drugs.
That means they're basically invincible. And MCR-1 could theoretically end
up jumping to all manner of bacteria.
"Polymyxins were the last class of antibiotics in which resistance was incapable
of spreading from cell to cell," co-author Jian-Hua Liu, a professor at Southern
Agricultural University in Guangzhou, told the AFP.
So much for that.
The researchers tested slaughterhouse pigs and raw meat from markets for
the gene. MCR-1 was found in 20 percent of the sampled pigs and 15 percent
of the meat, and in increasing abundance from year-to-year. The gene was
also found in E. coli K. pneumoniae samples taken from 16 of 1,322 patients
at two Chinese hospitals.
The results are troubling, to be sure. But they're not surprising. Antibiotic
resistant bacteria is already implicated in at least 700,000 deaths per year
worldwide, and some estimate that the death toll could skyrocket to 10 million
per year by 2050, if trends continue.
A recent report found that most members of the public don't even really
understand what antibiotic resistance means. It's a simple equation: The
more antibiotics that are used, the more bacteria are exposed to them and
have the chance to evolve resistance. If we don't conserve our antibiotic
usage, we'll quickly run out of antibiotics that actually work.
Polymyxins are meant to be reserved for dire medical cases -- after all,
these drugs are too toxic for a human to want to consume. But in China, their
rare usefulness in humans has led to a secondary use: animal husbandry. Chinese
pigs are some of the biggest consumers of the drug colistin, a kind of polymyxin,
which is used to fatten them up. The researchers report that this is almost
certainly the breeding ground of the resistance, and that the Ministry of
Agriculture has launched an investigation to assess this.
We may not have ruined colistin on pigs in the United States, but we're
on a path to do the same with other antibiotics. An estimated 70 percent
of the antibiotics important to health are used in livestock in the United
States. We may not be throwing away our last line of defense, but we're whittling
away at our day-to-day treatment options -- making it more likely that we'll
need harsh drugs like colistin.
Scary stuff, on a lot of levels. But the most immediate is financial: Let
a few high-profile cases of this or a similar bug crop up in the US and Europe,
and locals will lose all interest in traveling to the places thought to be
the source of the infections -- or of hosting visitors from those places. As
for imports of meat and other things that might contain bacteria, forget it.
The combination of wide-spread terrorism and super-bug disease might impede
the flow of people and goods in ways that tariffs and other forms of protectionism
never could. This might, in fact, be the week that the era of free trade and
open borders came to an end.
* Optimistic coda: Pandemics are obviously bad things. But the rise of superbugs
does offer a few favorable side effects. First, it might bring an end to factory
farming, one of the most brutal -- and it turns out, destructive -- chapters
of human history. Second, it will accelerate the trend towards local food,
which is great for small organic/sustainable farms and local communities in
general -- at the expense of Big Food.
