Time's Up!

An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis

Green Books Ltd

Contents

One Ten-Millionth of a Metre

Breathe in, and your body starts a battle. Countless micro-organisms hitch a lift on every stream of air being pulled into your lungs, seeking out a place where they can embed themselves and multiply. Once inside, every potential form of nutrition is fair game: blood cells, fat cells, skin, bone marrow, lymphatic fluid – all hosts for the army of invaders that just want to find a way of increasing their numbers. You are alive because your body has evolved ways of fighting them off. No medicine can match the efficiency of your own army of defenders across such a vast range of attackers, without killing off its host as well.

HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, is a beautiful thing to look at; rather like a three-dimensional cog with rounded buds spread across its spherical surface. In cross-section the central capsid, which contains the genetic material responsible for allowing HIV to fight off all but the most sophisticated drugs, is coffinshaped. So beautiful, so appropriate, but so terrible that it is able to cut through an entire country in just a few years, leaving a scarred, distressed and dying landscape of human beings in its wake.

In South Africa, 19% of the population of 44 million are infected with HIV. In Lesotho, 23% of the two million inhabitants have HIV. In Botswana, 24% of the population of just under two million – that's nearly a quarter of every person in this tiny country; adults, children, even new-born babies – have a virus that will eventually kill most of them. Over a million of these tiny viral entities could fit, side by side, on this full stop. We may have evolved defences against the oldest and most common viruses, but human evolution is a slow process; we have no natural defences against HIV.

Here is another statistic. The World Health Organization estimate that Dengue Fever, caused by four types of closely related virus, is a risk for around two-fifths of the world's population. Without treatment, Dengue Fever is deadly in 20% of cases, and there are around 50 million cases of the disease every year. Dengue Fever is spread by mosquitoes, as is Yellow Fever, which kills 30,000 people a year. Japanese Encephalitis is also spread by mosquitoes, but develops in pigs and birds before being passed to humans by the same species of mosquito that infected these other animals. This kills around 15,000 people a year and leaves another 25,000 permanently paralyzed.

Influenza is not spread by mosquitoes; it is spread by birds, humans and many other mammals, including domestic dogs and cat