Bacteria - The Silent Killers

Two things have changed my mind about hunting. A new friend and a disease. The new friend is an avid hunter who has taught me that most of the time, when hunting, the animal has the upper hand. He has shown me how easy it is for the tables to be turned on a hunter, so that he is instead the hunted. I have learned respect for the intelligence of wild animals and come to realize that being a successful hunter takes more than a big gun. It also takes a lot of ammunition.

A disease has also changed my way of thinking regarding hunting. I once wondered how anybody could take a gun to Bambi's mother. How could you peer through the scope of a deer rifle - look into her big black eyes - and slowly squeeze the trigger that would take away those eyes' sight forever? How could you pull off to the side of a road, finish your last gulp from a warm Extra Old Stock, pull out your 9mm and blow apart an 8" tall prairie dog? Well, I've learned how.

With the combination of our farmers getting rid of many of the natural predators, the explosive population growth of all the ungulates due to the bleeding-heart anti-hunting policies of current governments and our milder winters of late, we are being exposed to disease the likes that modern man has never known. White-tailed deer. American thrush (locally called robins). Deer mice. Black-legged ticks. Mosquitoes. Hanta virus. Equine encephalitis. West Nile disease. Lyme disease. It's not a pretty picture anymore and the bacterial and viral communities are poised for an attack not seen since the Bubonic Plague.

Don't laugh. Modern medicine is losing the fight to develop antibiotics faster than bacteria can say "I'm resistant!" And treatment for viruses... well, that's a joke. Add to that the lackadaisical and downright immoral attitude of government to develop new treatments, let alone take these diseases seriously, and we end up with a problem bigger than we can deal with.

If the general population knew about the bleakness ahead of us, there would be mass panic. The government knows this. It knows that if the medical community were to admit to some of the cover-ups and concealments, there would be an outcry so loud they would be forced to do something. Something they don't want to do - put some money into research. How many people have to get sick before something is done? How many people have to die? How long are citizens going to believe the stories fed to them by doctors? "Oh, you have Fibromyalgia." Or "It's all in your head." I have news for them. It's not all in our heads.

Fibromyalgia is the newest fad disease that doctors are diagnosing. Look around. How many of your friends, relatives or acquaintances have been diagnosed with it? I'd wager that everyone knows at least someone and many of us know more. And if you don't know anyone, it's because they haven't told you. Until you "catch" one of the many "auto-immune" diseases out there, you might not notice what's all around you. But once you start asking people, it's scary how many have one sort of "disorder" or other. Fibromyalgia is a syndrome. A syndrome is a catch-all for a disease that doctors cannot identify. They keep lumping people into it until they figure out what's causing the syndrome. These days most syndromes are being blamed on an auto-immune disorder. For the record, I do NOT believe that there is any such thing as an auto-immune disorder. I do NOT believe that the human body would attack itself for any reason. I DO believe, however, that your body is attacking as yet unidentified bacteria or viruses. It is way too easy to brush off these plagues - yes, plagues - as being caused by your own body. And this is why no cures can be found. Research is being wasted trying to figure out what's going wrong with your body, when nothing is. It is working correctly, fending off diseases that doctors are not recognizing.

The only reasonable conclusion to what is happening (no, I do not find an auto-immune reaction a reasonable conclusion) is that your body is fending off an invader. A reasonable response would be to try to identify the invader. If the bacteria, for instance, could be identified and tested for, then possibly a cure could be found. The test for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium responsible for one type of Lyme disease, is virtually useless since it is only accurate 20% of the time. This leads to 80% of those with Lyme disease being tested and told that they do not have the disease. The general public has been lead to believe that medical tests are 100% accurate and the vast majority of us would never question a medical test or a doctor's diagnosis. And why is it only 20% accurate? One line of thinking is that different species of the bacteria are endemic to different areas of the country. They cause the same or similar symptoms in people they have infected but over time have evolved slightly differently than their counterparts living a distance away. When the tests that work in one part of the country (Connecticut for instance) are used in another part of the country, the reliability of that test plummets. This is due to the fact that the test is trying to identify similar, but not exactly the same, organisms.

The whole problem is that most of these diseases don't kill. Killers get the government money. Like AIDS. AIDS research gets money because it kills. On the surface, this is an admirable reason for trying to cure the disease. However, AIDS is preventable. Hanta virus is not. West Nile disease is not. Lyme disease is not. Fortunately, for the government, Hanta virus has not become epidemic - yet. West Nile disease has not become epidemic - although, President Bill Clinton has recently declared a state of emergency in New Jersey due to the deaths occurring there caused by West Nile. And Lyme disease is generally not a killer. You just live a life of quiet misery, mainly because of misdiagnoses. Mainly because of resistance to treat "auto-immune" disorders with the correct drugs. Even when antibiotics are shown to work on many diseases such as Fibromyalgia, Lupus, Crohn's, colitis, even Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's or rheumatoid arthritis there is great resistance to the use of them. "How could antibiotics work on Lupus? It must be some coincidence. My doctor says I have Lupus and I believe him. It's an auto-immune disease." Doctors, led by the government, have convinced many patients that they can't be cured. They've convinced them to stop looking for answers. They've convinced them to lose hope.

I still have hope. I hope the white-tailed deer rots in Hell.

As always, send me your suggestions for future columns on crang.com. See you next week with a review of the Mel Gibson movie "Conspiracy Theory".

© November 25, 2000