14 August

The thing that saddens me the most, as I approach retirement, is seeing the probably unfixable damage social media culture has done to public health. I grew up in a world where widespread public health was still new, and really kicking goals after a huge push post-WW2. For years now I’ve been the only person at work who still masks. Fellow workers think I have some sort of mental illness, that I must be a ‘germaphobe’. I have no problem with germs at all, just with Covid. A killer virus. People with no understanding of infection or public health assume if it doesn’t kill you when you have it, it’s fine. Infections kill FAR more people in the longer term, from unseen damage, than they do in the acute time when they first catch it. The chronic diseases that are our greatest killers are infectious in origin, and the infections that cause them are sometimes years in the past. They’ll still kill you. I thought about this looking at the resurgence of HIV. A virus Australia was on the brink of eliminating. That effort has fallen to social media culture now too. Where lifestyles are more important than lives. The public health victories over infection last century were humankind’s greatest ever achievement. They doubled our life expectancies at birth, within one or two generations. Now in social media (adolescent, ‘trend’) culture, history is going into rapid reverse. Viral culture creates viruses. Viruses don’t go viral, people do, and create and spread them. You want the secret of a long life? Avoid infections. ALL infections. There are no harmless infections. The ones you recover from quickly will still kill you, just more slowly. Now the community is awash with infection again, an absolute travesty of the great achievements of the 20th century. We long ago eliminated waterborne diseases in Australia. But we refuse to do anything about airborne disease, assuming that’s normal. It’s not, it didn’t even meaningfully exist before we lived inside built environments. Those environments need to be upgraded to clean the air, just as we once cleaned the water. Florence Nightingale said that more than a lifetime ago. It’s as simple as that. Bring on more AI, to sweep away the wave of adolescent stupidity that now passes for adult life, inside our social media bubbles of imitative trending dumb. I seriously think it’s our only hope.