Adrian Esterman was on PM yesterday, giving a Covid state of play. Spoke of a shift in his own thinking…

Adrian Esterman was on PM yesterday, giving a Covid state of play. Spoke of a shift in his own thinking towards less concern about Long Covid now, and about infection of younger Australians. It reminded me again about Paul Ewald’s mission. /1

Ewald believes chronic or ‘stealth’ infections may be the causes of nearly all of our chronic diseases. I’ll use his words, several passages from his excellent “Plague Time”. In a nutshell, we need to stop being so blasé about infection, of any kind. /2 https://t.co/75kn84RcO9

“Medical research is consuming far more funds than it was when the health sciences were making breathtaking advancements in the quality and quantity of human life…When it comes to the control of disease, medicine gave us much less for much more money as the twentieth century…/3

…progressed….Little in the control of disease during the last half of the twentieth century involved fundamentally new approaches, in the same way that antibiotics are fundamentally different from vaccination, which is fundamentally different from hygienic improvements,… /4

…which is fundamentally different from surgical removal of diseased tissue. Rather we are recycling each of these solutions. The major advances during this period were vaccines and antibiotics. The payoffs from vaccination dwindled from the successes against polio, measles,…/5

…whooping cough, and mumps during the 1950s and 1960s to the more sporadic successes of the subsequent three decades…In spite of this declining return on investment, one fact stands out. Though there has been much investment in studies of genetic causation of disease,…/6

…the most significant returns were generated on the investments in studies of infectious diseases. Polio, measles, hepatitis, liver cancer, ulcers, and cervical cancer were all controlled or shown to be controllable during the last half of the twentieth century through the…/7

…control of infectious agents…[speaking of chronic infection from reservoirs in our bodies now] we need to remember that our expectations are biased by minds that tend to visualize threats as invaders coming from beyond our borders. Perhaps the experts are looking in the…/8

…wrong place. Perhaps the most menacing infectious adversaries are already here.” /end