RePresentation

   I saw this re-wording in a London Review notice and felt that it represented (or re-presented, as LRB put it) a good summary of how many of us come to view the world, or at least how it is "presented" to us.   For those of you in other parts of the world or even this country, what is being shown on your media may appear quite puzzling.  Black Lives Matter, de-fund the police, recent executive "orders" (not really "orders," said The Washington Post, but more of a series of "memorandums" which have far less legal sway), the mounting toll of the coronavirus, protesters rioting against unidentified military enforcers, and on and on.  To sit back and watch the news, it would seem that the U.S. is in utter chaos.  And even for those of us residing here, it can be confusing (as Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newhour puts it when discussing issues, "to help make sense of all of this...").  What IS going on and how does the public feel?   Even Rolling Stone, in a piece titled, Why Policing Is Broken, noted that the general public still had a rather high 53% of confidence in the police:* The only other major American institutions that enjoy more confidence are the military (73 percent had a "great deal/quite a lot" of confidence) and small business (68 percent).  Meanwhile, the numbers for Congress (11 percent), TV news (18 percent), HMOs [a limited form of health insurance popular in the U.S.] (19 percent), organized religion (29 percent), big business (23 percent), and banks (30 percent, down from 53 percent in 2004) have seen declines.  From the viewpoint of police officers interviewed, the article said: Many say they want to do a very difficult job the right way, and would welcome reform, but find themselves stymied by bureaucratic imperatives they say cast police in the rles of harassers and occupiers, working alongside known problem officers the system refuses to discipline.  

    As with much of the world (judging by the images of protesters throughout major cities), the Black Lives Matter is bringing out some long-held biases and breaking more than a few comfort levels.  Author and professor, Ibram X. Kendi, was a bit more blunt when he wrote a piece about racism in America for The Atlantic: It has been a massacring nation that said it cherished life, a slaveholding nation that claimed it valued liberty, a hierarchal nation that declared it valued equality, a disenfranchising nation that branded itself a democracy, a segregated nation that styled itself separate but equal, an excluding nation that boasted of opportunity for all.  A nation is what it does, not what it originally claimed it would be.  Often, a nation is precisely what it denies itself to be.  Add to that, said National Geographic, the fact that the national parks that we now enjoy owes much to the many black workers who helped construct and create such parks.  But lump both issues together and I admit that I could no more relate to the job of a police officer any more than I could relate to the life of a black person; I have no idea --even as a generalized group-- what their jobs or lives entail, what they encounter, what their thoughts are or what nightmares might haunt them.  Besides, exactly what police officers and black people are we talking about?  I may be of a similar age and color as my neighbor, but we are two very different people.  To lump races or professions into little more than indistinguishable ants is a bias of our own doing and something of our own creation.  The same might be true for how we view our colon (wait, what??).

   In the last post, I neglected to add this observation by author Ruth Kassinger in her book Slime:** Traditionally, the colon was assumed to have two purposes.  One was to reabsorb water from the slurry of food that makes it to the far end of the gastrointestinal tract.  The second was to compact the remains --including the indigestible long-chain polysaccharides-- and eject them from the body...As late as the 1970s, scientists believed that the lower gut was primarily inhabited by E. coli.  But with better lab techniques to culture gut microbiota and gene sequencing to identify them, microbiologists have come to a better understanding of the denizens of the large intestine, both in their astonishing number (one hundred trillion, or ten times the number of our bodies' own cells) and the variety of species (more than a thousand different ones)...We should count ourselves lucky to be occupied by bacteria.  They have digestive enzymes we lack.  Their enzymes are able to break apart the toughest polysaccharides that make it to the lower gut, chopping them into short-chain fatty acids.  These SCFAs can be burned by the body for energy and, we now know, provide up to 10 percent of a human's calories and considerably more of a herbivore's energy needs.  Beneficial gut microbes also create vitamins and hormonelike compounds that regulate other organs.  Another reason to love or at least appreciate these bacteria: They generate antioxidants and have an anti-inflammatory effect, and they make the colon more alkaline, which discourages harmful microbes from taking up residency.  

   Another story came from The London Review of Books: It starts with bone-shivering chills, which give way to high fever.  The attacks last between six and twelve hours, and end in profuse sweating.  When the chills and fever subside, they leave behind an enveloping fatigue.  But the relief may not last long,  The symptoms can cycle back again, sometimes returning like clockwork every day.  If you're unfortunate, there are also headaches and muscle aches; vomiting and diarrhea; weight loss; jaundice and, eventually, pallor; enlargement of the spleen and liver; and that all-consuming lethargy.  In many cases, these cyclical attacks, having eventually faded away, will reappear months or even many years later.  And if you are very unlucky, the original episodes will be followed by bleeding from the nose and gums, convultions, impaired vision, a variety of neurological disturbances, coma.  In attacks of the less serious sort, you may wish you were dead; in the worst cases, you will be.  The subject of the review was the mosquito, and the disease was malaria.  And if you thought that malaria was long-diminished and something only in land far, far away, the article added: In 2018, there were 228 million new cases of malaria; more than 400,000 people died, two-thirds of them children under the age of five.  In past centuries, malaria was widely distributed: it was present in Italy, England, American and Asia, but also in Scandanavia, sub-Arctic Russia and Scotland as far north as Inverness...Malaria is a disease of indifference and inequality.  For the rich world, malaria is a disease that happens elsewhere...Bill Gates (his foundation now spends more on world health than the World Health Organization) has pointed out repeatedly that more money goes into curing male baldness than into research on the prevention and cure of malaria.

   In another report by Matthew Hutson in The New Yorker, some of this lack of understanding a disease was brought out in a shockingly bright light when a report titled "The Characteristics of Pandemic Pathogens" was released by a team at John Hopkins: Outbreaks of plague have wreaked havoc throughout history, but the development of effective antibiotics in the past century "took bacteria off the table as a global biological risk for the most part," Amesh Adalja, a physician at John Hopkins and the report's project director, told me.  Bacteria can evolve, and develop drug resistance, but usually not quickly.  How about fungi?  They threaten some species, but don't adapt well to warm-blooded hosts (and may have helped encourage the evolution of warm-bloodedness).  Prions?  These are responsible for mad-cow disease and its human variant, but are mostly avoidable by preventing food contamination and refraining from cannibalism.  Protozoa?  Malaria has killing perhaps half of all humans who have ever lived.  But protozoa are typically transmitted by vectors such as mosquitoes and fleas, which are limited by climate and geography.  Viruses, the report concluded, are the real menaces...None of our off-the-shelf treatments equip us for such a pandemic.  If bacteria invade, there’s a long list of antibiotics you can try. Between ciprofloxacin and amoxicillin, we can treat dozens of different types of bacterial infection.  For the roughly two hundred identified viruses that afflict us, there are approved treatments for only ten or so.  And the antiviral drugs that exist tend to have narrow targets.  Only a few have been approved for use against more than one disease.  Many drugs that work on one virus don’t work on others within the same family; antivirals suited for some herpesviruses (such as the one that causes chicken pox and shingles) aren’t suited for others. Some antivirals can’t even treat different strains of the same virus...The strategies employed against bacterial diseases are generally useless when it comes to viruses.  Some antibiotics, including penicillin, interfere with proteins that form the cell walls of bacteria, causing the germs to burst open and die. (Viruses don’t have cell walls.)  Other antibiotics interfere with bacterial ribosomes—tiny intracellular structures that manufacture proteins—or mess with an enzyme crucial to a bacterium’s metabolism. (Viruses have neither.)  When a strain of virus does have an obvious vulnerability, there’s no guarantee that another strain will share it—an obstacle for crafting generalist antivirals.  And viruses tend to mutate quickly and readily acquire drug resistance...

    If you're wondering just how quickly, take the example author Kassinger mentioned of cyanobacteria: Most species can double every seven to twelve hours, which means a one-by-one-foot plot covered in cyanos would cover the floor of a small office in two days.  A few species can double every two hours, which means they could multiply to cover more than six football fields in the same period.  Said a piece in The New Republic: The coronavirus story is a story of fracture -- of conflict and confusion, of experts earning mistrust, of each side cultivating its own class of experts to own the other's...Our politics is beset by the tempting myth that science is an oracle, a referee for the deepest questions about what we owe to our fellows, our families, future generations, and the natural world.  This myth has offered us only two explicit options for how to relate to expertise: deference or debunking.  In turn, it has left us unable to hear in others' invocations of science anything other than smug attempts to gain power over us, or brutish refusal to accept the obvious truth.

    No matter your side or viewpoint, it would be difficult to step outside of your inner circle and try to form a concensus among a group of people, to "rule" a town or be elected leader of a country, or to decide how to tackle a pandemic  Often I try to read differing viewpoints and watch different shows such as those from Japan or Sweden, Canada or the UK, if only to try and see how other parts of the world are viewing themselves, and how they might be viewing us.   Here's but a small sampling of how the English writer, Eliot Weinberger, viewed the events taking place here in the U.S. in the first part of May: With the schools closed, 45 percent of men say they are spending more time home-schooling than their wives.  Three per cent of women say their husbands are spending more time home-schooling than they themselves are.  There's your divide right there, one could say.  But he gets a bit more serious: In the event that a vaccine is created, the question of how that vaccine will be delivered to hundreds of millions of people has barely been addressed.  There is a global shortage of the river sand used to manufacture the medical-grade glass needed for the vials.  Most syringes and latex caps are made in China or India, which may prefer to keep them for their own citizens.  American manufacturers say that, if they started working overtime now, it would take 18 months to produce enough syringes.  Luckily, the number needed may be less, as a third of Americans are unsure whether they would take a vaccine and 20 per cent of Republicans say they would definitely refuse.

   So what to do?  How to decide who's right and who's wrong?  Perhaps it would be easier to just count your lucky stars, and there is no better time than today and tomorrow when the Perseid meteor shower lights the sky.  Said Smithsonian: The annual celestial light show is caused by cosmic dust and debris left in Earth’s orbital path by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.  The comet last entered our solar system in 1992, and won’t be back until 2126, but we still get treated to its glowing remnants of its tail every year...The Perseids are so named after the hero of Greek mythology, Perseus, who was given a place in the stars for his bravery defeating monsters.  It's a chance to marvel at something so tiny making such a grand display.  Sometimes we just need a better perspective, a recognition that there are other ways to look at things, even if we don't agree or if they may turn out to be the best path forward; and sometimes we just need to acknowledge that the decision we made is the correct one and that we need to stand by it no matter the consequences.  You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own, said Michelle Obama.  Added Isabel Wilkerson on her recent book on the caste system and our divisions and what Martin Luther King had to say: A reporter in New Delhi had asked him about those who had fought him in Montgomery: had he, in the end, “transformed the hearts of the white people”?  Maybe some hearts, King replied.  Others remained bitter.  He moved on to another question.  Changing power differentials in order to redress vile histories of discrimination, he knew, was bound to be ugly.  Sometimes hearts barely figured at all. 

                                 Photo of Perseid Meteor Shower over Macedonia: Spaceweather.com/Stojan Stojanovski

 

*The NY Times recently reported that a Gallup poll from the past two months has dropped that figure to 48% confidence, a decline of 5 points and the first such decline in 27 years...

**Another interesting note from her book is the disparaging remarks about probiotics and how: ...many commercial "live cultures" are actually dead before they start the trek down the digestive track...The fad for colonic cleansing, however, is entirely wrong-headed and it wreaks havoc on the natural, balanced microbial ecosystem in your colon, killing beneficial bacteria and creating space for colonization by harmful ones.  She instead brings up the rarely-discussed field of pre-biotics, which are proving quite beneficial...and are available.