Staphylococcus Aureus
Tuesday, October 8
One more from The Anthropocene Reviewed — this one is from Staphylococcus Aureus and the Non-Denial Denial
Years ago, I acquired an infection in my left eye socket caused by the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. My vision clouded, and then my eye socket swelled shut, and I ended up hospitalized for over a week.
Had I experienced the same infection anytime in history before 1940, I would’ve likely lost not just my eye but my life. Then again, I wouldn’t have ever lived to acquire orbital cellulitis, because I would’ve died of the staph infections I had in childhood. Staphylococcus aureus is not a normal part of the human microbiome, but many people--perhaps around a third--are like me nonetheless hosts to colonies of it on our skin or in our nasal passages or in our digestive systems. These colonies are usually harmless, but while anyone can get sick with staph, those of us who live amid it every day are more likely to suffer infections.
When I was in the hospital, the infectious disease doctors made me feel very special. One told me, “You are colonized by some fascinatingly aggressive staph.” He told me I wouldn’t believe the petri dishes if I saw them, and went on to call my continued existence a real testament to modern medicine.
Which I suppose it is. For people like myself colonized by fascinatingly aggressive bacteria, there can be no hearkening back wistfully to past golden ages, because in all those pasts I would be dead.
…
It wasn’t until the late 1930s, a group of scientists at Oxford began testing their penicillin stocks, first on mice, and then in 1941 on a human subject, a policeman named Albert Alexander, who’d been cut by shrapnel during a German bombing raid, and who was dying of bacterial infections--in his case, both staphylococcus aureus and streptococcus. The penicillin caused a dramatic improvement in Alexander’s condition, but the researchers didn’t have enough of the drug to save him. The infections returned, and Alexander died in April of 1941. His seven-year-old daughter Sheila ended up in a local orphanage.
How recent is penicillin? That police officer’s daughter, Sheila, who ended up in the orphanage--she’s still alive. She married an American soldier and moved to California. She’s a painter. One of her recent paintings depicts a block of homes in an English village. Ivy grows up along one wall, creeping over the rough stone.
To me, the great mystery of life is why life wants to be. Staphylococcus doesn’t want to harm people. It doesn’t know about people. It just wants to be, like that ivy wants to spread across the wall, occupying more and more of it. How much? As much as it can. So it’s not staph’s fault that it wishes to be. Wishing to be is the mark of life, and the glory of it.
Hominids first appeared six million years ago years ago — spreading across the world, occupying more and more of it — but it’s only in the past few hundred years that we’ve begun to escape the terrible Darwinian incentive landscape of pain and punishment, random walks through a minefield.
I had a cavity filling last week. It was deep in my mouth: the wisdom tooth. The dentists must have used a drill with a bit made of tungsten carbide or diamond, two of the hardest materials in the world, rotating at up to 400,000 revolutions per minute, pulverizing my dental enamel into specs of dust, eventually cleaning out all of the decayed tissue. Two centuries ago, this would have been one of the most miserable experiences imaginable (although perhaps not as bad as the late stages of wisdom tooth decay).
But thankfully, I was born just in time, as one of the first of thousands of my hominid ancestors who have access to cheap and available anesthetic like Lidocaine. In less than 30 minutes, and with no pain whatsoever, my tooth decay was permanently cured.
In lots of ways, being born in the twenty-first century feels like having dodged a bullet by the skin of my teeth.