Extreme

I followed a Braam Malherbe vehicle in the traffic this morning. I have no idea if it was the Braam Malherbe vehicle or if there are other Braam Malherbe vehicles, but given that Braam Malherbe describes himself as:

A South African international motivational speaker, extreme conservationist, extreme adventurer, philanthropist, writer and educator.

you’d imagine that he’d probably have at least a jetski and an assault helicopter as well as a bakkie.

Basically, we’re looking at Lewis Pugh-lite here.

I’m concerned though. Is he not spreading himself a little thinly? Wouldn’t it be better to cut back on the range of activities he does and do them a bit better. Not, I hasten to add, that I’m suggesting that he’s not doing them well right now. Just that surely if he devoted a little more time to, say, the writing and the speaking, he could probably improve them both. Makes sense, no?

Also, what is “extreme conservation”? I find the idea rather discriminatory against less extreme, but equally endangered species.

“OMG Braam, the Lesser Spotted Beagle Owl has just been added to the red list!”
“That’s terrible, Penelope. What’s its primary habitat?”
“Well, the remaining 2 pairs live in the mountains just outside Somerset West.”
“Pfft. That’s nowhere near extreme enough. Let them die. Now, you got any more news on that Antarctic lichen? And get me a coffee – use those beans I brought back in that handmade snakeskin bag from that mountain in Mongolia.”

I’m guessing that’s probably what it’s like in his office most days. And that’s also why you’ll never see a Lesser Spotted Beagle Owl in Somerset West.

One of the reasons, anyway.

I’m sure that Braam Malherbe is a great guy, doing great things. I’m sure that he’d be even more famous than he already is if he’d only add “cold water swimmer” to his CV. And I’m sure that if he did do cold water swimming, he’d be more than willing to answer questions about the massive carbon footprint of his recent Seven Seas Expedition.

Worth repeating?

Worth repeating? Given the lack of action on this issue, despite the repeated warnings from people far more qualified and eminently more important than me, you could be excused for thinking not. However, given the gravity of the situation being described and the impact it will have on our ability to survive as a species – yeah, probably.

We’re back on that old chestnut of antibiotic resistance, I’m afraid. The topic rearing its ugly head on here thanks to this guest editorial in the South African Medical Journal for May 2015, penned by Marc Mendelson of UCT and Malebona Precious Matsoso from the DoH. It’s a local journal, written by local people, about local issues. Just like the Southern Suburbs Tatler. Except sane.
It makes such happy reading:

If our overuse and misuse of antibiotics is not halted now, about 10 million people will die annually from drug-resistant bacterial infections within 35 years. The hammer blow will fall hardest on Africa and Asia, accounting for 4.1 and 4.7 million deaths, respectively, and the world’s economy will lose more than 7% of its gross domestic product (USD210 trillion) by 2050.

If 10 million deaths sounds terrible, it’s because it is terrible. Put in context, annual deaths from HIV worldwide are around 1.5 million. TB accounts for 1.4 million deaths. Heart disease kills about 2.5 million people each year. Three big killers and we’re only just halfway there.

Fortunately, this is all way in the future, isn’t it? Well, no. It’s not:

This is not a futuristic scenario … it is being played out right here, right now, in South Africa and other countries across the globe. Decisions to withhold surgery based purely on the patient being colonised by pan-resistant bacteria are being made, and people are dying of untreatable infections in our hospitals and communities. Quite simply, our abuse of antibiotics is destroying modern medicine as we know it. Unless the international community can alter its path, we will lose the ‘miracle of antibiotics’.

So it’s here, and it’s going to get much worse, so why isn’t something being done about it? We’ve touched on this here before:

Of course, if this problem wasn’t so insidious, we’d all be panicking about it already. If there were a 9/11 or a Hurricane Sandy – a single event – there would be far more awareness. (Not that mere awareness would really help anyway.)
But that’s not the case with the antibiotic resistance problem. It’s sneaking up on us and, for those of us in the know, it’s rather worrying.

And on that note, for me, probably the most significant line in Mendelson’s and Matsoso’s musings:

These numbers should make people sit up, listen and change behaviour. But more often than not, it has to be personal to achieve this.

Yes. Sadly, that’s probably what it will take. And sadly, this will happen to people as well. It’s happened to me already this year.

I was reminded of this satirical piece by Andy Borowitz, penned in reference to climate change, but with a nice, ironic “resistance” twist:

Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports…
While reaffirming the gloomy assessments of the study, Logsdon held out hope that the threat of fact-resistant humans could be mitigated in the future. “Our research is very preliminary, but it’s possible that they will become more receptive to facts once they are in an environment without food, water, or oxygen,” he said.

Maybe the same will be true once we find ourselves without antibiotics as well.

We live in hope. Briefly.

Little & Large

No, not the popular 80s British comedy duo. I’m talking about ships.

To mark the 175th anniversary of the Cunard Shipping Line, that company took three of its biggest cruise liners to Liverpool’s River Mersey to celebrate. Since the ships in question were the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Victoria and the Queen Mary 2 (recently in Cape Town), it was billed as the 3 Queens. By all accounts, it was a resounding success, with ships, flypasts and fireworks for the estimated million onlookers to see.

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If you want to find images of the event, Google is your friend. Or Flickr. And the whole thing was streamed live on Youtube. Look, you’re not short of options here.

But while people are celebrating and having a good time, normal life goes on. And if you’re the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company Limited Seacat, Manannan (seen by me here), normal life is getting people from the Isle of Man to Liverpool. And it’s probably quite annoying when you get there and someone has taken your parking space:

11162081_1015281998482036_255042973669970321_nHey – it’s ok. There’s precedent: previously in Liverpool, Manannan has had to sneak in behind the QM2 to dock at the landing stage.
But… scale!

20150525233254There she is, just off the stern of the QM2. And while we snigger at the tiny Manx ferry, it’s worth noting that it’s not actually that tiny: it’s 96m long, and carries 850 passengers and crew and 200 cars. Mind you, compare that with the QM2’s 345m length and 4,350 passenger and crew capacity, and yeah, ok.

Of course, it’s not a fair comparison – these vessels have different jobs and are each designed to fit their respective purposes. But the QM2 is awfully big, isn’t she?

Short

A quick post about our current predicaments:

There’s not enough electricity to go around. This is actually very old news, although South Africans continue to complain about it while doing nothing to save the damn stuff when they have it. It’s clear that generally, despite their lack of action to combat the problem, people are very unhappy about it.

The alternative, of course, is gas. We don’t have it plumbed to our houses here in SA like some other countries I’ve lived in, so it comes in big bottles. Well, it would if there wasn’t a shortage of it:

Dear Customers,
As you may have heard through the media, LP gas is currently in short supply in South Africa as a result of planned maintenance on a few of the major refineries in the country.
Please take the time to read the attached letter regarding the LP gas supply issues we are currently experiencing.

I’ll spare you the attached letter, which basically says there’s a shortage of gas, resulting in “unavoidable price increases”. Supply and demand etc etc. People are not going to be happy.

Anecdotally (hey, it works for Prof Tim), there’s also a shortage of diesel in Cape Town. My car doesn’t run on diesel. Mrs 6000’s car does run on diesel – when she can find some to put in it. Same with lorries delivering food and goods all over the country. Less diesel, higher demand, higher prices (although they are somewhat regulated in SA) = unhappy people.

And now, arguably the most serious of all, we have a shortage of water. Figures due to be released this morning will almost certainly indicate that the reservoirs supplying Cape Town are now less than half full. That’s not good, but ironically, it’s less than half the problem as well. The bigger issue is that it’s also not raining on the local farms:

A drought that has probably reduced South Africa’s corn crop for 2015 to the smallest in eight years is also putting at least half the country’s wheat harvest at risk, the largest grain farmers’ lobby said.
Farms in the Western Cape have had little or no rain since the start of the planting season in April and need showers before the end of May, Andries Theron, vice chairman of Grain SA, told reporters Thursday at an agricultural show in Bothaville.

The province, whose wheat fields are rain-fed, produces about 50% of the nation’s harvest of the cereal, data from the Grain Information Service show.
“We started planting in dry soil,” he said. “Usually, our rainy season would start in the middle of April, but it didn’t. We’ve got a hectic season on hand.”

And then this, from Agri Wes-Cape’s CEO Carl Opperman:

“This has been the driest summer the province has seen in many years. Rains that should have already fallen are desperately needed, especially by grain farmers.
“It’s a dry circle that we’ve got at the moment. We will be managing it, so we’re expecting rain in the future. It’s most probably going to be what we call ‘a dry winter'”.

Come now, Carl – drop the technical terminology, can’t you? You’re unnecessarily baffling us with bullshit there. Is there really no language you could have used so that us laypersons could understand?

Looking at the forecast for the coming week, our local grain farmers are going to remain disappointed.

And so… guess what? Less grain supply, no reduction in demand = higher prices. And that means unhappy people.

I’ve never been convinced that a single straw could break a camel’s back. But several big fat straws? Well, maybe we’re in for interesting times ahead.

H58 is coming

Well, in fact, H58 is already here. And it’s going to kill you.

Let’s take a step back for just  a moment here though. And let’s consider Ebola, which is something else that kills you a lot. The (probably a little underestimated) figures for the 2014 (but still ongoing) West Africa Ebola epidemic suggest that 11,000 people died. That’s pretty awful. But it pales into some sort of disgraceful insignificance when you compare it with the 200,000 people who die from typhoid each year.

Typhoid is indisputably nasty. That said, it’s different from Ebola in that while it’s much more widespread, the mortality rates are not quite as high. And a lot of that is probably down to the fact that it’s caused by a bacterium (it’s called Salmonella typhi and yes, it’s related to the food poisoning bug that you get from not cooking your chicken enough) and not by a virus. As any fule kno, bacterial diseases can be treated with antibiotics, killing the bugs and making the person remain alive. Good news for typhoid sufferers.

That is, until now.

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Because a new strain of Salmonella typhi is here: Salmonella typhi H58. And H58 is resistant to antibiotics like ciprofloxacin and azithromycin – drugs that people use to treat typhoid. According to the Guardian:

An international team of researchers analysed the DNA of nearly 2000 typhoid pathogens from countries across Asia and Africa and found that a single multiple- drug resistant strain had swept through Asia and crossed into Africa over the past 30 years.
Nearly half of the organisms studied belonged to the resistant strain, called H58, which has steadily pushed out older strains that are susceptible to common antibiotics people buy over the counter or take to protect themselves from the disease.

And H58 is rapidly becoming the dominant strain of S.typhi, easily pushing the other, lesser, more antibiotic-susceptible, more treatable, less deadly strains out of the way:

In some regions, H58 is displacing strains that have been established for hundreds of years: “We were all amazed at what we saw. When you see the data, it’s pretty stark. It’s very convincing that it’s becoming the dominant strain,” said Gordon Dougan, a senior researcher at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge.
“This beast can get into a new area and it’s at an advantage, because a lot of competition is wiped out by antibiotics.”

Hear that? When a senior researcher at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge calls it a beast, you know it’s properly dangerous. Senior researchers at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge aren’t employed to throw words like that around willy-nilly. They’re beige and they’re dull and they’re sensible. The accountants auditors of the microbiological world. Using the word “beast” to describe a strain of bacteria is off-the-fricking-scale to a senior researcher at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge. This is obviously serious stuff.

Serious, and urgent:

The global spread of the strain requires “urgent international attention,” the scientists write in the report. “This is killing 200,000 people a year and no one is really noticing,” said Nick Feasey, a co-author on the study at Liverpool Tropical School of Tropical Diseases.

So – a time for action then? I doubt it. I’ve been telling you all for ages that we’re all going to die horrible deaths at the (metaphorical) hands of drug-resistant bacteria, and no-one has done a damn thing about it.

One of the reasons for this continued lack of decisive action against the spread of antibiotic resistance is that it’s an insidious thing; there’s been no one defining event – no instant train smash – to draw attention to it. Sadly, with the destruction of infrastructure in Nepal – where H58 is prevalent – after the recent earthquakes, we might well see a big spike in the number of cases, which may stick it into the global spotlight until the next plane crash, court case or contentious political statement.

All of which are obviously far more important.

UPDATE: Finally, someone is listening