WHO's Chan warns: Swine flu is tip of the iceberg - we're heading to the pre-antibiotic era

“The prediction is that, within the next 10-20 years, food production in Africa will drop by 50%. If that’s the case, how many more people will go hungry? Remember that malnourished, stunted children cannot reach their education potential, which will have a massive social and economic impact.”

Chan worries, too, about massive rises in non-communicable diseases (cancer, diabetes, smoking-related illnesses) outside their traditional stamping grounds of the well-fed west. The trouble, from her point of view, is that these diseases attract nothing like the funds that, say, malaria or polio or HIV/AIDS do: “60-80% of the disease burden in developing countries is now due to so-called lifestyle diseases”

“The challenge is drug-resistant TB. And this is really huge. If it gets out of control,” Chan warns, “it will take us back to the pre-antibiotic era.”

SHOOT: What that means, quite simply, is a rapid, widespread and quite massive die-off of our species. From people getting sick. From people not having enough to eat. Quite a fall from the dizzy heights of 2008, no?

clipped from dprogram.net Furthermore, modelling suggests that swine flu has an attack rate of 30% — once it enters a country, the likelihood is 30% of citizens will catch it at some point. In wealthy countries such as Britain, she observes, “The disease is self-limiting. Some even recover without medicine. But is it going to be the same in a country where they have a high proportion of people suffering from HIV? Or chronic malnutrition? Or diabetes? [all of which damage immune systems]?” Pregnant women are among the groups most severely affected; already, every minute of every day, a woman dies in childbirth or pregnancy. Furthermore, unlike seasonal flu, H1N1 tends to affect previously healthy 30-50 year-olds; developing countries have large, young populations often living in crowded conditions. Declining food security will, she predicts, mean massive rises in people dying from malnutrition and diarrhoea, and probably more wars.