Deborah Jones

 

    This month's death of Dolly the cloned sheep reinvigorated our debate about the health and ethical dangers of cloning. World-famous Dolly received intense scrutiny, from front-page news to school essays to coffee-shop conversation. But when all is said and done, Dolly didn't die because she was cloned. She died of a lung infection that even the best care could not cure.

 

    Whether they're cloned or not, sheep -- and all other animals including us humans -- die all the time of microbial infections. And if we're smart, what we'll remember about Dolly is the way she died, rather than how she came to be.

 

    If this sounds strange, consider that infectious disease has always been one of our worst enemies. Viruses and other microbes did their share, but bacterial diseases such as bubonic plague wiped out cities and waylaid entire civilizations.

 

    That's still the case in much of the Third World, but we lucky ones in the developed world have largely forgotten our history. That's because for the past three generations or so -- since antibiotics were developed and widely distributed -- popping a few pills quickly made us better.

 

    Unfortunately, we've become so complacent about these superdrugs that we've misused them. Bacteria, nature's original opportunistic survivors, are evolving and gaining immunity to our antibiotics. This is our own fault. We have allowed our world to become awash in antibiotics. Up to half of all antibiotics are used routinely and mostly unnecessarily to raise food animals faster and bigger. We buy antibiotic soaps, kitchen cutting boards, cleaning clothes. And every time we demand an antibiotic prescription for a common cold or flu, or we fail to finish a course of antibiotics, or we buy the drugs on the black market, we contribute to the problem.

 

    Every day, every single one of us helps bacteria in their selection of the fittest.

 

    This is, of course, stupid and dangerous. But who cares? It's hard to make this new danger sound sexy. Bacteria lack the popular appeal of Dolly the cloned sheep. Yucky "antibiotic resistant bacteria" lacks the cachet of, say, genetic engineering or Frankenstein-like genetically modified organisms. Can you imagine Luke Skywalker swinging his lightsabre at a bacterial infection?

 

    While few of us are yet directly affected by genetic technologies, each of us, from birth, wages a life-or-death battle with bacteria. And if our drugs continue to become useless, in the very near future we'll no longer be able to rely on medicine to save us when our immune systems falter. Quite simply, we'll die -- just as our ancestors died.

 

    "Infectious diseases are responsible for about two-thirds of all cases of people missing work," says Bob Hancock, director of the Centre for Microbial Science at University of B.C. And while antibiotics were used to keep serious illness in check, hospitals especially are awash with resistant bacteria which, warns Hancock, "is starting to climb out of hospitals and into the community."

 

    Reporting is sketchy, compared to other causes of death, but scientists conservatively estimate that annually in North America one million people are infected by drug-resistant bacteria in hospitals, and 20,000 to 80,000 of them die. The health care cost is some $1.5 to $2.5 billion. Hancock suspects that the real numbers are much, much higher.

 

    Some solutions to this very real plague are in the hands of policy makers, who need prodding from the public. Antibiotic use in agriculture should be curtailed. Although Canada already does this better than most other countries, we could better-regulate overprescriptions of antibiotics by doctors.

 

    Every one of us could help. We could eat only meat from animals raised without drugs -- often but not necessarily labelled "organic." Increased demand would lead to increased and less expensive supply by supermarkets and butchers. We could stop demanding unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions. We should ban all "antibiotic" household products from our doorsteps.

 

 

    Perhaps the coalition should take a lesson from poor old Dolly, whose white fuzzy visage became the popular face of the whole cloning issue. The NIPA should swap clunky phrases like "antibiotic resistant bacteria" and long Latin names of bacteria, and find a furry-faced mascot with a catchy name for their cause. Arby, maybe?