This AL-Monitor report on microbial resistance to drugs developing in Iraq is unsettling:
[Microbial resistance] has reached alarming highs around the world in recent years as simple infections become harder and harder to treat. Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections killed 1.27 million people in 2019, according to a study by The Lancet medical journal — more than HIV-AIDS or malaria. Experts say antimicrobial resistance (which refers not only to resistant bacteria but also to viruses, fungi and parasites) could kill up to 10 million people a year by 2050.
Iraq already stands out as one of the places hardest hit by this developing crisis, particularly the city of Mosul where worrisome rates of antibiotic resistance were recorded by international medical nongovernmental organizations that intervened there in the wake of the war against the Islamic State (IS). In 2019, a staggering 40% of patients admitted to a post-operative care facility run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Mosul carried multidrug-resistant infections, according to MSF.
Five years later, this silent health crisis is still sweeping unchecked through the city’s private and public hospitals. “There’s a real danger,” Ahmad told Al-Monitor. “But when you look at the official response, it doesn’t feel like we are in a crisis. Iraq is behind on tackling this issue.” …
[Prescribing antibiotics for any disease is] a habit that remains deeply rooted in the [Iraqi] health care system, several doctors and medical nurses in Mosul acknowledged. “Here, most doctors prescribe antibiotics for any simple disease. They don’t follow a scientific protocol or a gradual approach with syrups and pills; they don’t send samples to the lab to see which antibiotics are needed. Many prescribe injectable antibiotics right away,” Omar Mudhafar, the head of an awareness-raising unit at the Mosul General Hospital, told Al-Monitor.
Are the monsters coming to get us?
So, in the metaphorical forest we can see that mishandling powerful drugs has similar consequences to mishandling powerful weapons.
But out of the forest, I was struck by the parallels between this and the American political situation. Just as American political groups have come to resist compromise, so does humanity refuse, quite understandably, to give up friends and family to the attack of microbes, such as those which causes smallpox, TB, and many other illnesses that we have learned to mitigate, cure, and even expunge.
The cost may be ever greater plagues.
I realize this parallel is all a bit horrific, but I think it’s worthwhile for those of a political bent to meditate on their enmity to compromise, and to consider how important their arrogance – because that’s the poison at the root of the tree of comity – is to their ego, and to perhaps consider tamping that down a bit.
