Category: learning curve

Short

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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

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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…

Found another video

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Belatedly, I’ve found another video from our recent trip to Sanbona – must have overlooked it on the SD card when I was downloading stuff last week.

I have no idea what has happened to this video.
I came here in May 2018 and it was gone. It's not even on Youtube anymore.

These are the three female (tawny) lionesses on the reserve. There are probably cubs around and that’s why they are a bit feisty at the moment. Our ranger said it’s not unusual for there to be brief tussles like this, but it’s rare that any serious damage is done.

It might not be unusual for him to see this, but it was certainly a first for me.

First aid kit

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Just a quick heads up for readers. We recently had “an incident” at home – a minor thing, nothing too serious, just a bit sore – that required some first aid. As a trained first aider, this shouldn’t have proven too much of a problem for me.
It was only when I started toward the first aid kit that I remembered that last time I used the first aid kit, I noted that it needed some replenishment. The popular items get used up quickly and the less used ones go out of date. But then, typically, I hadn’t done anything about it. And of course, one of the worst times to remember that the first aid kit needs replenishing is when you’re heading for the first aid kit with a damaged child in hand.

That’s why I’m suggesting that you make a note or set a reminder to check your first aid kit this evening. 

And why not tell your friends and family to do the same. Because it’s no fun to have improvise and make a plaster out of leaves, and antiseptic poultice from soil and beagle hair, I can tell you.

If you want to know what you need, here’s a good guide (especially for those of you with kids). Alternatively, Dischem have got you covered for the basics or more.

Western Cape Number Plates

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Here’s a comprehensive guide as to where in the Western Cape those two and three letter C codes belong. Why not print it out and take it along on your next (Western Cape) road trip to amuse the kids, the wife, or the (intelligent and literate) beagle? It’s also useful as a tool to work out where hitch-hikers want to end up.

TBCPRPl(click it for bigness)

From this map, you can see how the curse of generally poor and overly aggressive driving has leached from CY into CF. CF is a particularly thin area, and thus it seems likely that CL will soon be affected. They’re already mostly drunk on the heady mix of fine wine and Afrikaans in Stellies, and I fear that the curse of the CY may be altogether too much for the roads to handle.