Monday, March 16, 2015
Healthcare Practitioners Modern Flint Knappers
With the resurgence of the paleolithic diet, perhaps we should also consider paleolithic hygiene. The shaping of flint points was accomplished by skillful removal of ultrasharp (in excess of razor-sharp) flakes of glassy material. The artisan flint-knappers were community treasures, but they were banned from living near others, because they were also habitual child killers. Ingestion of flint flakes is lethal and the inherent flakiness of flint-knappers made them personae non gratae. Children living near flint-knappers died at an alarming rate and flint-knappers never sired offspring who didn’t whither and die.
Wise communities cherished flint-knappers, but they got the point and kept the knappers at a distance.
Constant Selection for New Pathogens
Where do bacterial pathogens come from and how are they spread? Some pathogenic bacteria are harbored by other animal species that humans encounter. We can pick up bacteria from pets, barnyard animals and game. We routinely place large numbers of humans in contact with every ecological niche on the planet and transport any bacteria that can grow humans rapidly to population centers. The human gut provides a mixing bowl where newly acquired bacteria are systematically extracted for their genes and recombined with resident bacterial genomes. Within days new bacteria are ready for testing in the new environment.
The most potent selection agents are antibiotics. After antibiotic treatment, only bacteria, both old residents, new arrivals, with resistance, will survive. New arrivals that incorporate the antibiotic resistance of residents will be immediately successful. New arrivals that enter with previously acquired resistance will be immediate successes and spread to fill niches vacated by antibiotic-sensitive residents.
Should Nurses and Doctors Be Quarantined?
Nurses and doctors who routinely touch patients and inhale the atomized bacterial mist around patients, receive a continuous inoculum of problematic bacteria. Healthcare practitioners are, however, immune to most of these potential pathogens by virtue of their highly educated immune systems. Unfortunately they do not get sick, but they are still potentially infectious. Their gut flora and the bacteria on their other surfaces are potential sources of the pathogens that they have acquired in their duties. Every contact with healthcare practitioners or by chronic exposure, to members of their immediate families, is potentially compromising to anyone with a compromised immune system.
A Modest Proposal: Routine Screening, Purging and Healthful Fecal Transplants
The public deserves to be healthier after treatment with a healthcare professional. It is therefore mandatory that the bacteria received from a nurse or doctor through professional (or informal) contact be safe and healthy. It should be an expectation that healthcare professionals have guts that are clean-running and sanitary. To that end, it seems reasonable to routinely screen their resident bacteria and if necessary replace it with a health-promoting alternative.
We expect professional athletes to be free of performance enhancing drugs. It makes sense that doctors and nurses be free of pathogens.
Labels:
flint,
healthcare,
knappers,
modern,
practitioners
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