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Germs are us
We are the most successful and careless parasites...
Britain, followed by the rest of Europe, is waging war. The enemy has all the qualities of an alien invader, and the measures to fight it have reached levels of desperation. Suffice it to report that the UK government has cordoned off the countryside for both farmers and ramblers. Horse races, too, have been cancelled. The police have set up checkpoints at strategic crossroads, and all day they stop cars and fumigate their tyres with lethal disinfectant. Lorries and freight trucks are searched for the offensive invader. Many farms have been evacuated and corralled with yellow police tape. Every country in Europe is searching the luggage of every tourist originating from the UK and confiscating offensive meats. At borders, cars and trucks have to drive through pools of disinfectant.
Nick Brown, the English Minister of Agriculture, has called the invasion `a national tragedy' and Tony Blair emerges ruffled every day from `crisis cabinets.' There is even talk of postponing the national election. News in the UK are dominated by images of funeral pyres burning the aliens and their hosts: in the first two weeks of the invasion 35,000 cattle have been slaughtered and cremated. The invader is the microscopic virus that causes Foot and Mouth Disease, and although Europe will win this round of battle, the world will never win the war.
Foot and Mouth Disease creeps up on two-hoofed animals such as sheep, horses, pigs, cows and so on, and at its onset, blisters mushroom in the animal's mouth and feet. The blisters pop and the animal eats painfully, hobbles on its raw feet, develops a temperature, and pregnant females may abort their foetuses. Yet, if allowed to run its natural course, the animal's immune system cures the disease. Meat and milk remains untainted. Humans are not known to pick up the disease. Also, vaccination can shield the animals from future outbreaks. Which makes you wonder: why does most of the world pursue a campaign of eradicating the virus? Spurred by a vision of cosmetically perfect, aseptic meat chops on supermarket shelves, and untouchable economies of scale, the meat industry's wisdom is that exterminating the virus is the best long-term policy. But it's a policy based in the premise of arrogance that we can fumigate undesirable parasites into oblivion, extinction even. We can't, as the current and previous outbreaks in the UK and elsewhere prove.
New York-based science writer Carl Zimmer, who recently published a book about parasites called Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures, has written: `Truthfully, total eradication [of parasites] is just a dream. They are so resourceful and abundant.'
Day after day we faithfully chase a vision of a sterile world where all germs will be banished. In this artificial world, a germ that slips past our defences finds an abundance of hosts and no competition. This is part of the reason why diseases that would otherwise snipe randomly and locally flare up into epidemics. Another part of the reason is that epidemics spread when populations of plants, animals or humans live in close density and threaten to overrun the environment. Nature's defence mechanism ensures that when a species' population grows beyond a certain threshold of density, another species propagates profusely as it takes advantage of the availability of abundant food (the overpopulated host). Eventually, a balance works itself again. Call it ecological logic.
The web of life flourishes on symbioses. Species' relationships evolved to either scratch each other's back or eat one another. For both reasons, we have to live together, and the symbiotic balance is diverse and delicate, bleak and beautiful, brutal and kind. It's that complexity that makes life fragile, mystic and wonderful, perhaps the reasons why we are all philosophers at heart.
Yet we have mostly turned nature's logic on its head. We have replaced diversity with monocultures. We poison the soil and water to kill undesirable and deadly parasites. We beat nature in submission. And we ignore the fact - the ecological logic - that when we flip part of the natural weighing scale, we also rock the part under our feet. One way that is happening is that in a sterile world our immune system is turning on ourselves. Studies comparing sections of societies that live in sanitary conditions (such as people in most of the western world) to those that live surrounded by squiggly, mucky germs have shown that the incidence of allergies only shows up in the former mostly. It's easy to understand why: co-evolution with parasites has honed our immune system to keep those parasites at bay, and suddenly, with fewer germs to fight, our immune system is overreacting, triggering a repertoire of allergies.
Whether it's allergies, epidemics or the spectre of bacteria that are evolving resistance to antibiotics (currently a hellish medical scenario), perhaps it's about time we start living by nature's logic. In the case of Foot and Mouth Disease, this might mean smaller, non-intensive farms, where animals are reared, slaughtered, and sold locally. Also, organic farming which works by extending the ecological logic. That way, Foot and Mouth Disease will survive perpetually but diminutively to the point where its effects are largely insignificant. The added value is healthier food. I am simplifying things here but you get the gist: a stance of management inspired by nature's logic.
We are the most successful parasites, but also the most careless. An intelligent parasite knows that if you kill off your host you got nowhere to live - and yet, by our relentless overindulgence on nature, the way we're destroying nature and subduing our symbiotic neighbours, that is exactly what we're doing. At this rate, chances are that the Foot and Mouth Disease virus will outlive the human species.
© Victor Paul Borg
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