Hey, Presidential Candidates,

The Real Terrorism Threat’s Inside our Bodies

While many Americans are looking over their shoulders at terrorist threats they’ve been told they should worry about, there’s a growing threat that the public cannot see without an electron microscope. MDROs (Multiple-drug Resistant Organisms) represent a threat of enormous proportion. Yet, if you try to find this issue discussed in any of the Presidential debates aired so far, good luck. It seems none of the candidates running for President of the United States in 2016 have heard of antibiotics, or superbugs, despite the World Health Organization’s 2014 global report that states that antibiotic resistance presents “a serious worldwide threat to public health.”

Despite recent reports in the Washington Post that warn “that drug shortages in ERs across the United States have increased by more than 400 percent between 2001 and 2014.” The Post adds that “the most common drugs on shortage are used to treat infectious diseases, relieve pain, and treat patients who have been poisoned.” Doctors call this a public health crisis. The Post further states that no one seems to be responsible because “the majority of drugs are sterile injectables with low profit margins.” In short, there’s no profitable reason to produce more of these necessary drugs and government cannot legally mandate such production. Not when it’s busy building munitions, bombers, and military drones to defend its citizens against the worst intentions of its enemies, wherever they might be.

It seems not one of our political candidates bothered to consider the words of Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security of the World Health Organization, when he said: “the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill.” Why? Because to my eye, it seems to be acceptable policy to allow citizens to die of ordinary infections and injuries in hospitals but unacceptable if these same citizens are killed in a terrorist attack.

Of all the American candidates for President, only Hilary Clinton mentions ‘bioterrorism’ on her website, saying, “Highly contagious diseases are a constant threat,” and she lists it under the rubric of National Security Threats. She encourages Americans to “remain vigilant” to “prevent and contain outbreaks.”

But who should do what? And how?

In March 2015 President Obama announced his National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria (NAP). It was a proposal that promised $1.2 billion to fight the overuse of antibiotics. It called for a 50 percent reduction in inappropriate antibiotic use in doctor’s offices and a 20 percent reduction in hospital use by 2020. But the President could extract only voluntary promises from the biggest antibiotics (ab)users (agribusiness) to reduce their daily fix of treating their commodities (chickens, cows, and hogs) with endless antibiotics.

That part of the NAP that impacts agribusinesses contains no stipulated mandates. So there will be no enforcement provisions to ensure that the voluntary targets have been met. The only caveat is that agribusinesses are required to enlist veterinarians to prescribe antibiotics fed to animals. It simply means that agribusinesses can no longer order thousands of pounds of antibiotics and dump it into the feed trough of their animals. But does anyone believe that these corporate farms will have any problem finding veterinarians to write prescriptions for the antibiotics they feed to their animals?

The question is why President Obama did not legally mandate that agribusinesses slash their reliance on antibiotics from their current level of approximately 80 percent of the volume sold in America to say, half, or even 20 percent? It wouldn’t be because the agribusinesses of America are regulated by the Department of Agriculture and protected by its equally potent Agricultural lobby which cushions its industry from changes of any kind, even if they’re beneficial to the country as a whole. Would it?

The U.S. Government is aware that approximately 23,000 Americans a year die from a lack of available antibiotic treatment annually and more than 2,000,000 illnesses are caused as a result of a lack of effective treatments. Perhaps that’s not enough death to justify front-page reporting. Or perhaps the problem is too complex. Recently there have been reports in newspapers that Americans do not understand the term MDROs. So now the term drug-resistance has begun to be employed, since most Americans can grasp that without a dictionary.

Maybe more Americans would understand the coming crisis if the President referred to the changes facing their healthcare system, changes that will soon find Americans in hospitals that resemble the medical tents used in the Civil War when patients were vulnerable to ordinary infections since antibiotics would not be discovered for another 60 to 70 years. So the Civil War doctors faced limited medical options once an infection set in. Would it heal or not? If not, their only choice was to hack off limbs and then hope all that bloody effort was for the best.

Perhaps if the President resorted to the bully pulpit to explain the “Post-Antibiotic Era” to Americans, they would understand there is an unseen crisis hurtling at us at breakneck speeds we cannot control. Bombs, guns, drones — none of these devices can begin to attack the problem. And that is the problem. The tools we require are no longer being developed and manufactured by pharmaceuticals because the essential drugs are only required part-time, not on a regular basis, and so do not generate enough revenue to justify their billion-dollar price tags.

Perhaps if one of the Presidential candidates told the American people that soon childbirth will become a life threatening event. Or that cancer treatments, chemotherapies, will become impossible without antibiotics and painkillers. And for those planning major — or even minor — surgeries, those procedures will no longer be an option without supporting medications.

And since no one can tell pharmaceuticals what drugs to develop and produce, not even the President of the United States, then what recourse is there? How many will have to die before pharmaceuticals begin to develop the next round of antibacterials? While many believe we need less government than more, who, if not the federal government, can legally mandate the new production of antibacterial drugs to keep the American people safe? What we may need is an American on the Moon project where the goal is x number of new antibacterials developed in the next y years. Developed as a result of deliberate allocations of our tax dollars to encourage the commercial sector that there is a reason to develop new products to keep human beings alive.

Maybe we need a candidate who will tell Americans that the threats to their safety are not only out there in the Muslim world, but inside their own bodies. Maybe someone should remind Americans that it was the Summer of 2014 when the Ebola virus emerged out of the jungles of West Africa to terrify the world. And as Ebola began to make unscheduled appearances in the United States and other nations unused to seeing hemorrhagic viruses, all of us who once thought that no, it cannot happen over here, only over there to those people, had to face the grim prospect that it can and was happening over here.

To us.

This jolted the whole world to attention. Suddenly, everyone was vulnerable.

No matter where they lived.

Not one candidate has linked Ebola or bacterial infections like MRSA or C-Diff or KPE to the coming crisis. Perhaps none of them want to face the gruesome reality: there is a real terrorist threat in America they cannot see or put an unhappy face on.

And it has nothing to do with ISIS.

It has everything to do with the microbiology and biochemistry of our bodies, the companies that are not developing medications for financial reasons, and the inability of our politicians to orchestrate a proactive response to the crisis. We can do it. But it will require creative, inspired leadership and not just another National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria that ends up being tossed into the circular file after a dramatic introduction.

If only politicians would stop pandering to the basest fears of Americans instead of honestly discussing the issues that matter, perhaps the public would still believe their leaders could not only bring out the best in us, but speak plainly, truthfully about the important issues of the times and if they say that what you cannot see can not only harm you, but can kill you, then Americans would take those words to heart as axioms of a policy the country should follow.

J.W. Steinberg is a novelist living in New York City. His first novel, The Superbug Sequence has recently been published and is available on Amazon.com as an e-book.