We are all so caught up in the Covid-19 pandemic that we are forgetting there are millions of other diseases circulating right now. I was talking with my mom just the other day about the fear of the Coronavirus when we came to the conclusion that this is how anti-vaxxers should feel every day about so many other diseases, since they have no immunity. So let’s take our focus off of the coronavirus for just a few minutes and look at a couple other diseases that could impact us. One of these is Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis can be a serious infection of the lungs with symptoms of cough, night sweats, weight loss, and fever. The Global Fund recently posted an article discussing the new initiative to end Tuberculosis in the workplace. This initiative involves many large-scale corporations such as Johnson and Johnson and Royal Phillips that are fighting the spread of TB. The article says, “TB is the world’s deadliest infectious disease – killing 1.5 million people in 2018, more than HIV/AIDS and malaria deaths combined,” noting that a lot of cases are associated with the spread through the workplace. By starting this initiative they will not only be looking out for the health of their workers, but will also be avoiding the economic burden TB brings with it.
Another disease present in our world is malaria. The malaria report of 2019 said that this disease is “increasingly a disease of poverty and inequity.” The thing that is helping the number of malaria cases go down the most is the global investment to prevent this disease and without these investments, the numbers would be much higher than they are today. The article tells us that 93% of malaria cases are in Africa and it targets mainly pregnant women and children under 5 years of age. The main reason it is so prevalent in this area is because they do not have the resources like we have here in the United States to both prevent mosquito bites or the life-saving interventions available to us. This is why global investment and action into this disease is helping so much. It is more of a resource issue than anything else, and if we work together to get them the help they need, we could eradicate this disease. This would be quite an accomplishment considering how many lives Malaria takes each year.
So what IS happening outside of this Coronavirus pandemic? None of us would know because we only ever hear about Covid-19 on the news, at the store, on Instagram, everywhere. I believe that we have taken our focus off many other major health issues with the rise of this pandemic and when everything starts to calm down, all of these issues will start to emerge out of the shadows again. Maybe worse now than they were when we began all of this craziness. I am not saying that we should be taking the coronavirus any less serious, but if we put the precaution and research into every other disease like we are for the Coronavirus right now, we could have a lot less of circulating diseases. But also, we would never get everything done because we would be consumed with worry of infection and how these diseases have the power to dominate our world. So all in all what I am trying to say is that maybe we should begin to open our eyes back up to the other circulating diseases so that we don’t dig ourselves another hole after we get out of this one from the Coronavirus.
Magnifying Microbiology 