I have written before of the increasing risk of major disease outbreak that is being fomented by this government’s ongoing policies of creating poverty. What I write now is something I don’t want you to take my word for, but to ask your own chief medical advisers, Professor Dame Sally Davies and Dr Felicity Harvey to confirm what I say. The words are not even going to be entirely my own; I am going to quote a qualified doctor of medicine, who wrote most of them as long ago as the 1960s. He was Dr Murray Leinster. Keep in mind, please, the upsurge in cases of malnutrition that have been reported in the general press in recent times, because this is likely to be a significant contributory factor to what could happen in the near future.
Leinster wrote:
“In every human body there are always germs. The process of good health is in part a continual combat with slight and unnoticed infections. Because of victories over small invasions, a human body acquires defences against larger invasions of contagion. Without such constant small victories, a body ceases to keep its defences strong against beachheads of infection. Yet malnutrition or even exhaustion can weaken a body once admirably equipped for this sort of guerilla warfare.
“If an undernourished child fails to win one skirmish, he can become overwhelmed by a contagion the same child would never have known about had he only been a little stronger. But, overwhelmed, he is a sporadic case of disease – a case not traceable to another clinical case. And he can then become, very easily, the origin of an epidemic. In slum conditions a disease not known in years can arise and spread like wildfire.”
Under/mal-nourishment need not be the only cause of such an outbreak. Children who are under-exercised and under stimulated can, through the development of lethargy, also fall prey to contagion. And it need not only apply in the case of children.
Only very recently there was an outbreak of measles in Wales. It would be interesting to know which were the first-affected children in that outbreak and what are/were their social circumstances at the time or ongoing. The medical community is concerned, says the press, of the rapid increase in scarlet fever cases that have been occurring since 2010. There has also been a noticeable flurry of interest in the “family tree” of bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis) since the floods that have devastated parts of this country and Europe. Those floods drove large quantities of raw sewage up to the surface, and the microbes that infest that material will most certainly still be lying in the ground, especially beneath affected homes. Typhoid and cholera are therefore a real risk, especially among children playing in such places following rainfall. hands on the ground as part of a fall; hands in mouth not long afterwards. Transmission complete.
While this government is not actively building slum accommodation, it IS creating the kind of conditions that were once associated with that type of accommodation. Hostels, populated by inmates with varying degrees of personal hygiene are probably as close as we will come to actual slums these days, but we also have bed and breakfast accommodation being used, and it can be virtually guaranteed that not all of those outlets will have the highest of hygiene standards. Shared bedding, supposedly cleaned between customers, is likely to have been washed at low temperature to save on costs. Urticaria is therefore a strong possibility. That’s only a minor inconvenience, but it is contagious, meaning that people will need time away from their work to visit their GP for the cure and that means adversely affected output in the workplace. Since the introduction of the bedroom tax, people have been forced into using these types of accommodation and have, in cases that I could quote in a private, rather than broadcast, email become malnourished because of lack of sufficient money with which to feed themselves. Inadequate income is always to be found at the root of such a social situation, and this has been reported upon since the early 1900s by all manner of social commentators, from Daniel Defoe to Jack London, as well as “big name” authors of medical papers, the United Nations and the World Health Organisation.
We have poverty-stricken families who are relying upon charity for their food – almost a million this year as estimates go. They’re eating canned and dried foods which, for the most part, wouldn’t recognise a vitamin if it exploded in them. Foodbanks won’t take fresh vegetables because they have no way to store them and keep them fresh. Likewise frozen foods and meats – the FB’s don;t have the wherewithal to pay for electricity costs. Malnutrition, and the risk of diseases associated with it, is therefore bound to increase in line with the increasing use of these charitable outlets.
It has long been known that a child who has eaten an adequate breakfast will outperform one who has not, in terms of educational achievement. It is therefore logical to state that the same rule must apply to the quality of work turned out by an employee. One who cannot afford an adequate breakfast, such as a workfarer who receives only the usual benefit allowance and has the added burden of fares to and from the placement on top of everything else that he was trying to pay before, is not going to perform as well as an employee whose wage has been calculated to allow him to attend that place of work with a full belly. It follows, therefore, that the government’s active creation of poverty – via sanctions, for example – is actually undermining the economic recovery process, for the sake of scoring political Smartie points and nothing else, and that providing the less well-off with the support that their situations require would actually speed up and bolster the recovery process. The need for the government to be seen to be doing well at reducing unemployment has been proven time and time again by the repeated pre-scripted lies – the parrot phrases – that have been pushed into the press by the DWP since 2011.
One might argue that the programme of innoculations that children are required to undergo will stave off the problem of major disease epidemics becoming reality, yet the facts dispute this. Scarlet fever is on the rise; ricketts has shown up in several areas of the UK; smallpox has recently been proven not to be a dead disease in certain parts of the regularly visited world. Interestingly, from Defoe’s Journal Of the Plague Year, it can be inferred that bubonic plague and smallpox appear to attack in league with one another, so one has to wonder if this explains the aforementioned flurry of interest in the former. Maybe the BP can only succeed if the immune system is first run down by a smallpox attack that the body manages to counter? In these days of air travel the transmission of smallpox, back into a nation which has for years believed itself safe from it, would not be at all difficult. We all carry diseases, on our skins, in the fibres of our clothing, in our hair. With the tendency these days to wash clothing at low temperatures, the likelihood of diseases in the fibres being eliminated has decreased considerably. With this in mind, the question must be asked: how long will it be before polio returns to the UK?
Whether or not there will be a major outbreak of a capital disease, such as polio or even measles, before the end of this Parliamentary term remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that this government MUST STOP adding fuel to the fire before it does become uncontrollable. Children from impoverished backgrounds attend the same schools as those from better-off homes, and kids are notorious for picking up all manner of coughs, sniffles and runny tummies and passing them on to adults who never have booster jabs unless they’re going abroad on holiday. The rate of dispersal of a potentially devastating epidemic is standing ready to be phenomenal. Not only that, of course, but there are a growing number of parents who refuse, point blank, to have their children immunised because they have grounds to hold a deep distrust of the type of vaccinations now being offered.
We are sitting on a ticking time bomb whose components are made all over the world. Will this government wake up and realise this or, as with the floods, will there be an ill co-ordinated rush to control the damage once it’s been done, with those who must answer for the problem hiding in COBRA meetings again?
I would appreciate it if this article was not passed to Public Health England. The response from them to my last email was so poorly researched that it was not worth the micro-volt of energy that it took to be transmitted to me.
Sincerely,
Darren Lynch
