Avescope Memento Mori

Towns which encouraged the consumptive now set up
barricades against the tubercular. The sick were driven from
their homes in places, and some doctors refused to treat those
they had treated before.
Since World War Two, antibiotics have been our saviour. If it’s a
bacteria, antibiotics have been able to treat it. Infections.
Gangrene. Syphilis. Chlamydia. Gonorrhea. Tuberculosis.
Meningitis. Pneumonia. Ulcers. Cholera. Dysentery. Typhus.
Typhoid Fever. Bubonic plague (our old friend the Black Death)
to name a very small number of big bads that we shouldn’t
have to deal with anymore.
Except we do. We’ve used antibiotics like a fire-hose on a
crowd and we didn’t take into account that the crowd might
decide to move out of the way. Overuse of antibiotics on health
issues they cannot fix- for example viral infections like the fluor
non compliance of antibiotic instructions - people feeling
better and not finishing the prescribed dose- as well as liberal
use in food animals -over ¾ of the world’s antibiotics are used
in livestock - has made bacteria smarter and hardier. Scientists
are working on new antibiotics to counter the resistant
bacterial strains, but there is the possibility that one day the
magic beans just won’t work anymore and then all the
monsters will come back.
Because the horseman is waiting.
La miseria -
Cristóbal Rojas - 1886
Again, TB became a trendsetter. One of the reasons skirts rose
off the ground in the early 1900s was so that women wouldn’t
‘sweep tuberculosis into the home’. Men shaved off their
muttonchops and beards lest the bacteria cling to it and infect
their families. Spitting in the streets became illegal in most
places, laws which remain on the books in most places to this
day.
Enter antibiotics. TB was treated aggressively in the west in the
20th Century, with school children lining up for yearly chest x-
rays into the 1960s. Hooray! But TB is still endemic in many
parts of the world with as much as one quarter of the world’s
population being infected with TB- either in its latent or active
form. Hoorooh. Moreover, non-compliance with antibiotic
based treatments has lead to the growth of antibiotic strains of
TB spreading at an alarming rate.
We are overdue for a pandemic. It might be a flu again. It
might be a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola. Ebola is actually a bad
virus. It traditionally kills too quickly with too short an
incubation period, so it doesn’t spread so well. But Ebola is
learning and changing so one never knows. Tuberculosis, a
disease with a not highly effective vaccine, could outstrip our
antibiotics. Or the biggest of the baddies could come back.
Smallpox. Eradicated in 1980 and supposedly only existing in
two laboratories in the world though samples of frozen and
dried smallpox virus and scabs have been found since.
Smallpox is virulent and disfiguring. Smallpox, which is said to
have killed 500 million people around the world from 1850-
1980. Smallpox killed the young and the old. Kings and
beggars. It is the greatest scourge that mankind has ever
known. As such, in the post-war world, the medical
establishment, in concerted action with governments, made it
a mission to kill this beast. Through treatment and worldwide
vaccination, we slew the dragon. Since the mid-1970s, we don’t
even vaccinate for smallpox anymore.
But to this day, one needs to pass a TB test to work in
medicine. People with active tuberculosis are not allowed to
immigrate to many countries, and most western nations
require a chest X-ray before allowing permanent residency
status. For some countries, even for temporary residency. The
World Health Organization has guidelines for travel with TB
because there were reports of TB infection by aircraft crews
and passengers in the 1990s. While the risk is very small, it's still
a concern. It is impossible to screen everyone.
The horseman is clever and travel-savvy. He does planes, trains
and automobiles too. We might have forgotten the horseman
but he hasn’t forgotten us. He knows all our little tricks to avoid
him. He's been there, done that and has fields of corpses as
souvenirs.
Avescope | 21
Vaccinating the Poor
National Library of Medicine - History of Medicine