A
man came into the office on Monday asking if anybody at the Times-Journal knew
anything about the end of the world.
That seems to always be a pretty popular
topic.
Apparently he had gotten wind of an Internet
rumor about a super-virus that was going to wipe out 95 percent of the world's
population before the end of the year.
Now, this isn't the first time I've heard the
world was going to end in 2012. And it won't be the last time I'll hear the
world is going to end in my lifetime.
I tried not to think about it, but curiosity
eventually got the better of me. So I opened up Chrome and tabbed through the
Web pages of five state representatives I was trying to get in touch with about
House Bill 265 until I got to my search engine tab.
All I had to type into Google was "world
ending virus" and low and behold, I discovered that NDM-1 is the next big
threat to scare the fool out of everyone. From what I can figure out from all
the incoherent babel on the Internet, NDM-1 originated in India and Bangladesh
and is called the New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1.
Well, that's a mouth-full. So, I'll just stick
with NDM-1.
After a few minutes of reading, I discovered
it's some kind of gene in bacteria that makes the bacteria resistant to
antibiotics. I read some legitimate websites and some blogs written by the
end-of-the-world crowd. Between the two, I couldn't figure out if NDM-1 was
resistant to all antibiotics or all but two antibiotics.
But, I did learn it was primarily transferred
through medical tourism.
My next question should have been can this
stuff actually kill you? But, I kind of got hung up on medical tourism.
Medical and tourism aren't two words I
commonly associate with each other. I personally haven't ever planned to take a
vacation, travel to some distant land and have a medical procedure. I usually
plan to go camping or fishing - maybe even to go back to Las Vegas. I suppose
Las Vegas can be as bad on the wallet as a medical procedure. That's about the
only association I can make between "medical" and
"tourism."
But, apparently there are a lot of people who
actually plan to go to India or Bangladesh for medical procedures. Hence the
term medical tourism. Keep in mind, I got my information from the Internet, so
take it with a grain or two of salt. From what I can tell, a lot of Europeans
travel to India and Bangladesh to get cheap plastic surgery.
They'd fly off to India and Bangladesh for a
tummy-tuck, facelift or breast implants and come home with NDM-1, courtesy of
medical equipment that wasn't sterilized. After I learned that, the luster of
the end-of-the-world-by-NDM-1 faded pretty quickly.
I never figured out if NDM-1 could actually
kill you. I started watching a 4 minute 30 second video on YouTube by
"hetfamiliekabinet" who captioned herself as TheTrutherGirls. But,
she was holding the camera in her hand, I think, so the video footage was
wobbly. That annoyed me to the point I turned off the video about a minute into
it. So, I all I learned from here was NDM-1 "was like a bacteria."
Good to know.
With all the stuff floating around on the
Internet about NDM-1, I could see why the guy was alarmed by a super-virus
scare. But, the way I see it, we don't have a whole lot to worry about unless
95 percent of the world's population flies to India or Bangladesh for medical
tourism ... I mean a facelift.
Huck Treadwell
Times Journal
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