Next year, when your child wants to get vaccinated, will you worry about the deterioration of the vaccine?
When you pick up delicious cakes and biscuits, do you worry about the serious cardiovascular damage caused by trans fat of vegetable oil?
When you use shampoo from unknown sources in a barber shop, do you think of dioxane?
When you go to the supermarket to buy Edible oil, will you still consider the so-called healthy tea oil? – If the carcinogen benzopyrene in the products of the largest tea oil manufacturer in China exceeds the standard, what about other companies?
Counting the public health events in 2010, we can almost see the shadow of man-made disasters. To some extent, the threat to our health is not all kinds of germs in nature, but more and more “man-made diseases”.
“Man-made disease” is not a punishment of nature, but a “masterpiece” of human beings. In other words, we are living among many pathogenic factors made by ourselves. These “man-made diseases” can be roughly divided into several categories: the first category is the arbitrary abuse of technical means, the second category is the unhealthy modern lifestyle, and the third category is the ubiquitous environmental pollution. All these have greatly increased our health risks.
misuse of technical means
China can be called the country with the most serious abuse of antibiotics in the world, and the problem of bacterial drug resistance can be imagined. In fact, most hospitals in China have highly drug-resistant “superbacteria”, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which doctors have long been familiar with. The old problem has not been solved, but new problems have emerged: the “superbacteria” carrying the vest of NDM-1 gene can defeat almost all the antibiotics currently possessed by mankind. When we marvel at the great power of “superbacteria”, we can’t help asking: bacteria are not born so powerful. Who led to the birth of “superbacteria”?
Antibiotics are not the only ones being abused. The primary purpose of drug invention is to cure the sick and save the people, but some people first regard it as a tool for making profits, rather than care whether it is necessary and risky. In China’s weight-loss drug market, sibutramine has many names: Qumei, aoquqing, nomitine… After the drug regulatory departments in Europe and the United States, China’s State Food and drug administration finally stopped sibutramine.
After Qu Mei fell. The chaos in the weight loss market has not stopped. Illegal addition of sibutramine and other weight-loss drugs to various so-called weight-loss health products, including weight-loss tea, is common. But the regulatory authorities lack methods. Now, a “Ascaris egg slimming drug” is even hot on the Internet. This morbid weight loss method uses Ascaris lumbricoides to constantly reproduce in the abdomen and absorb nutrients from the human body to lose weight. Its health risk is self-evident.
Vaccines are undoubtedly a good thing. Mr. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who has devoted himself to philanthropy, regarded it as an investment with extremely high returns and donated hundreds of millions of dollars for vaccine research and distribution. However, once the vaccine is used improperly, the result may be harmful. The Shanxi vaccine incident has made many people afraid of vaccines. Of course, it may be difficult to determine how much the illness of some children is related to the vaccines injected. However, the Shanxi CDC did have improper behavior in the storage and transportation of vaccines, resulting in the invalidation of some vaccines.
unhealthy lifestyle
In March 2010, experts from the diabetes branch of the Chinese Medical Association wrote an article in the internationally renowned academic journal New England Journal of medicine that almost one in 10 Chinese adults over the age of 20 suffered from diabetes. This prevalence rate is more than three times that of the 2002 survey data. Although some colleagues questioned its accuracy, it should be an indisputable fact that the number of diabetes patients in China has increased dramatically. And various unhealthy lifestyles, including eating more and moving less, are important factors in the pathogenesis of diabetes.
Smoking ranks first among unhealthy lifestyles. In the view of Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and prevention and former director of the New York City Department of health, smoking is even more harmful to New Yorkers than the “9 / 11” terrorist attacks. However, the Chinese people lost more and won less in the war on tobacco control. The year 2010 marks the 5th anniversary of the entry into force of the Framework Convention on tobacco control drafted under the leadership of the World Health Organization. However, according to the World Health Organization’s global adult tobacco survey, nearly one-third of Chinese adults over the age of 15 smoke, and nearly 80% of Chinese people do not know enough about the dangers of smoking.
environmental pollution
The highly publicized “precocious puberty” incident of three girls in Wuhan was finally considered by the Ministry of health to be not directly related to Shengyuan milk powder. However, the widespread environmental hormones in the environment we live in do lead to a considerable number of girls’ precocious puberty. Among these environmental hormones, phthalates are a kind of synthetic organic compounds, which are used as plasticizers in the production of plastic products; Bisphenol A is also one of the raw materials in polycarbonate and other plastics. In November 2010, the European Union announced that bisphenol A would be banned from baby bottles. Whether China would follow suit is probably a major concern of hundreds of millions of parents.
When economic development makes GDP data look good, most local officials may ignore its by-product environmental pollution and health damage. In 2009, the shadow of blood lead exceeding the standard in Fengxiang, Shaanxi province did not disappear. In 2010, the blood lead incident continued to spread throughout the country. From Jiahe in Hunan to Xinyi in Jiangsu, children were tested for excessive blood lead and even lead poisoning beyond the normal level. In the face of these incidents, the first thing the local government does is not to stop polluting enterprises, but to suppress the victims.
There are also some pathogenic factors of “artificial diseases”, which may be difficult for us to simply classify. For example, China also uses artificial trans fatty acids in many foods, such as margarine and repeatedly fried foods. It sounds like trans fatty acids are not as hateful as “gutter oil”, but they are confirmed to increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and coronary heart disease.
So far, under the strong advocacy of the World Health Organization, only one infectious disease smallpox has been eliminated in the world. Once “man-made diseases” occur, it may be more difficult to eliminate them. “Melamine” toxic milk powder has long become a rat crossing the street, and everyone calls for it, but some manufacturers still add it wantonly in dairy products.
absent government supervision
Each of us may be the causative factor of “man-made diseases”. We either smoke, have other unhealthy lifestyles, or participate in polluting the environment.
The unrestrained pursuit of commercial interests is the direct driver of “man-made diseases”. Only in the primary commercial society where disorderly competition and integrity have not yet been established can businesses dare to tamper with milk, oxygen and vaccines for children to reduce costs and make profits. Countless low-cost products with endless consequences were sold to the public, and various toxins were precipitated in people’s bodies, which gradually evolved into various strange “man-made diseases”.
The absence of government supervision and the disregard for the public’s basic health rights have pushed “man-made diseases” out of control.
The problem of antibiotic abuse is a commonplace in China, but the situation of the public’s lack of common sense of rational drug use, the lack of action by government departments, and the “sharing” of the interests of some pharmaceutical enterprises and medical personnel has not fundamentally changed.
It is not uncommon in the pharmaceutical industry for a drug to be withdrawn from the market due to the gradual appearance of serious side effects. But a question that has to be pondered is: how should our government treat and regulate weight-loss drugs? In the past 10 years, sibutramine, a prescription drug, has been sold as an ordinary health care product in China. The sales volume of Qumei alone has exceeded 5 billion yuan. Our supervision and management department has turned a blind eye to this for as long as 10 years.
Some experts criticized that China’s performance in implementing the Framework Convention on tobacco control is extremely poor, and the national action plan for tobacco control has not yet been published. Behind the poor performance are the strength of tobacco interest groups and the embarrassment of the health sector.
In the face of blood lead pollution incidents, the first thing the local government does is not to stop polluting enterprises, but to suppress the victims.
In his novel the pestis, Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, invented a pestis that occurred in Oran, Algeria, in the 1940s. The pestis hinted at all kinds of social defects. When SARS came, many Chinese people had similar experiences about the pestis written by Camus.
If the defects of the public health system continue, if the defects of the whole society can not be remedied and corrected, the “man-made diseases” will only become more and more serious.
Behind the “man-made disease” is actually a “social disease”.
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