The Fall of Man

Antibacterial Hand Soap Destroys Humanity

Film at 11

The baby has a fever.  A worried parent rushes the child to the emergency room, heart pounding in her ears, the metallic taste of terror in her throat.  It was so hard bringing this little life into the world, so many sacrifices have already been made...  She pleads to whatever gods might be listening to spare her child.

Into the harsh lighting, glare of tile, that antiseptic smell that never quite coats the scent of the anguish of the thousands that have come before.  The doctor, cool and assured, comforts the young mother with his relaxed demeanor and, before she can stumble over another "Thank you", the child's fever is broken, the delicate creature held in the fierce, gentle embrace of his mother.  He sleeps quietly.

Another victory for modern medicine.

A man, hardworking husband and father of two, suffers some sort of attack while on the job.  His strength fails him, suddenly, unexpectedly.  A sharp pain constricts his chest as effectively as a steel band.  He is scared now.  He is young still, too young for a heart attack, surely, but the seeds of doubt are blooming in his heart.  He takes himself to the emergency room, dreading what the doctor may tell him.  He is a fairly intelligent individual and a bit too widely read.  He knows some of the possibilities that his symptoms indicate, and all of those options are bad.

A virus?  A fever, really?  Hadn't even noticed...  An antibiotic to treat a virus?  That doesn't seem right...  Isn't one limited to waiting it out when it comes to virii?

He leaves the hospital, still in pain (not his heart) and still barely able to draw breath (not his lungs) with a prescription for antibiotics in his hand he won't bother to fill.  The next day he goes to a local chiropracter who, with a bit of pressure in the right place, relieves the constriction of a nerve bound between two of the man's ribs.  The man feels instantaneously better, virus or no.

Another victory for modern medicine?

A worried parent takes her child to the emergency room, not because he seems to be in real danger, but the parent is worried about her firstborn, just barely a year old, and she works all day.  Doctor's offices are long closed by the time she gets home.  Some hospitals offer a service they call "convenient care", doctors available for those people who can't afford to miss work.

The doctor's cool, almost cold demeanor, does nothing to put the young mother's mind at ease.  His condescending manner grates on her nerves, but she puts up with it for the sake of her child's health.  While he makes it very, very clear that he feels the woman is an hysterical mother overreacting to the smallest sniffle and the child has a cold which will clear up, on its own, in a matter of days, the doctor gives the woman a prescription for antibiotics that the child doesn't need.  The doctor wants the lunatic, and her brat, out of his ER.  They don't even have insurance, after all, and his time is worth more than the state is willing to pay.  Besides, any idiot could see the child just has a cold.  Give her a scrip and she'll leave, right?

The woman, seething but hiding it well, thanks the doctor, fills the prescription, and the child takes it for a couple of days.

Uh...  victory?

Many people do not finish their antibiotics, even though they are told to.

Many doctors hand out prescriptions for antibiotics to people who obviously don't need them, even though they shouldn't.

Almost every bathroom sink has antibiotic hand soap available for use.

Some day humanity will be driven to extinction by our only, natural predators.  But wait, isn't Mankind the only animal with no natural predators?  If you believe that, dear Reader, you have been terribly misinformed.  We are preyed upon by fungi, bacteria, and virii every day.  Our enemies just happen to be some of the smallest, and most ancient, forms of life on this planet.

Of course a case could be made to refer to this as parasitism, occasionally lethal but usually annoying.  Semantics. Bacteria are our predators, and we their prey.  It is true enough that some bacteria, in the right place, at the right time, are quite beneficial.  There are bacteria colonizing every human colon helping us digest our meals.  If they get out though, should the intestines be perforated, lethal sepsis almost invariably ensues.  Every day, the enemy strengthens and we are running out of weapons.

We have seen an interesting statistic (keeping in mind 57.3% of statistics are totally made up) illustrating that, on a long enough timeline (four days or more), a staph infection is the unavoidable result of any hospital stay.  Sometimes, apparently, people forget to wash beneath their nails and the result is a patient struggling with methycillin-resistant stapholococcus aureas (MRSA).  The patient, perhaps already weakened by recent surgery, illness, or injury, is likely to lose the battle and find little solace in grave's embrace.

One must understand that bacteria evolve, and they do so a frightening pace.  Any survivors, like when a patient fails to finish the prescription of antibiotics and sometimes not, develop an immunity to the chemical warfare agent designed to destroy it.  If these bacteria happen to spread to a new host through any number of means, they take their resistance with them and are able to not only pass it to their own offspring, but share it with any other bacteria with which they come into contact!  Worse, bacteria can leave behind a sort of data disk that any other bacteria can pick up and gain resistance to every sort of antibiotic the first bacteria was resistant to, not to mention the resistances it already had!

In very short order, one is faced with an enemy that is immune or highly resistant to every weapon in our arsenal.  It is very like the sci-fi staple of the invaders from Planet X, save that the enemy is already here.  Medical science desperately scrambles to find new weapons, but time is short and the problem is spreading.

A large part of our difficulties with bacteria stem from the fact that humanity is typically very, very bad at listening to Nature.  You see, when Nature comes up with an antibiotic (such as in honey and many plant varieties), it has thousands of antibiotic properties and thus ensures that it works.  Even if a bacteria were immune to hundreds of antibiotics, there are hundreds more that kill it in these cases.  When humanity comes up with an antibiotic, it has one property, one avenue of assault, and survivors easily adapt to thwart it.

Whenever a child gets a scrape, Mom reaches for the triple-antibiotic ointment.  When you wash your hands in the public restroom, the soap claims to kill germs.  Antibiotics are everywhere in the human world, being overused and abused to such degree that, unless we change our ways, very soon humanity will be wiped from this planet like excrement from a boot.  We will be the aliens dying of the common cold.

This is the way our world ends:  Not with a bang, but a sniffle.