Germs

Here’s some health news: My pal Sparky has resumed his two-pack-a-day cigarette regimen. This means everything is back to normal on the flu front. If your doctor hasn’t gotten the word yet, don’t worry, you can just mention that Sparky said everything’s OK.

You may recall that, as a precautionary measure, Sparky temporarily cut back to being a one-pack man a few months ago. That’s back when the flu was dropping people like bowling pins. Paradoxically, the stronger they were, the harder they fell. That was a very strange state of affairs. Even Sparky got concerned, and Sparky usually don’t worry ‘bout nothin’.

Anyway, now that all that stuff has blown over we can resume our normal habits.

Sparky has refueled his Zippo. Me, I’m back to slouching in my beach chair, throwing pebbles into the water, and contemplating things that I’m not nearly smart enough to understand. That’s a mighty long list. Fortunately, I’ve got a lot of pebbles.

Since we’ve been talking about the flu I’ll toss out this contemplation: germs.

If I had to pick one thing that defines the “modern” era, I’d say it’s the germ theory of disease along with related developments such as antibiotics. This stuff is remarkably recent in origin. Well, I guess if you want to get picky about things, you could cite some old developments such as the ancient Egyptian practice of putting honey (which has antibiotic properties) on wounds.

But I’ll just take the conventional outlook here. In my schooldays we learned about two heroes of the modern era. These were Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), the French chemist associated with giving germ theory its broad credibility, and Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), the Scottish doctor who discovered penicillin.

It wasn’t until the post-WWII era that the age of antibiotics really got rolling. My grandmother, a nurse, had clear recollections of people getting wiped out by tuberculosis and she said it wasn’t until the 1950s that they firmly had the lid on it in the U.S.

Meanwhile, on the viral front, in 1952 an American doctor, Jonas Salk (1914-1995), unveiled his polio vaccine. After that is still took nearly a decade for polio vaccination efforts to really propagate through the U.S. There’s a lot more to the polio story than that, and it’s an interesting part of history.

This history is recent indeed. My parents remember polio.

With that in mind, I reckon that I am of the first generation to be born into a time and place where science had largely conquered the major infectious threats. That strikes me as a mighty fortunate situation.

Of course, nature never rests. Germs have been around a lot longer than we have.

So whether the recent successes are a sustainable trajectory, or merely constitute an aberration destined to snap back to the mean, well, it’s not for me to say.

Not all microorganisms are dangerous to us, of course. Here’s some weird science: It’s been estimated that the human body contains more microbe cells (bacteria, etc.) than human cells. So, in a sense, we’re more them than we are us.

If that weird science doesn’t freak you out, here’s an even weirder notion that might do the trick. In his book Straw Dogs, the philosopher John Gray presents the notion that humans are “technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival.”

Now there’s a twist in the plot, eh? If you want to entertain that notion, then humans have vanquished some germs, only to remain as walking meat colonies owned by some other germs. In that case, are we merely human battlefields, getting stomped all over while the microscopic combatants slug it out? I guess you could make that argument.

As for me, well, I’ve thought about this germ thing long enough. It just gets more and more complicated. Furthermore, I’m out of pebbles.