FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2024
Joe D’Souza
The mantra for good health lies in a sound and healthy mind. What constitutes a healthy mind is not very easy to express or establish. Every minute, dozens of thoughts flash across our mind. Many may appear as of our doings and others seem reflex or spontaneous. Indeed, meditation and spirituality often assists us, but to reach that moment of tranquillity and serenity is intricate and requires exercises spelt in our yogic sciences. These helps to improve our immunity by healthy lifestyles, wholesome nutrition, good sleep, positive mind directed towards self reliance, alertness to the calls of nature and our own biological clock. These as far as possible, should avoid our reliance on others and unrealistic super natural forces thus discovering the God within you and me. From the basics of spirituality, we know that good thoughts generate good deeds, which translate themselves into good habits and finally excellent character with minimal wants and desires. Our optimally dwelling on basic needs and ugly greed being kept suppressed resulting into excellent physiology and maximal happiness and reduced hormonal imbalances. The destructive body secretions require artificial perfumes and sprays to counter the toxicity and malfunctioning of our organs must be avoided.
Today many fake doctors, quacks and self-styled and self-proclaimed medical fraternity have induced the quotient of fear and panic in humankind due to ignorance. I have been a witness to my grandparents dying in peace, at ripe age of ninety years, without ever seeking medical interventions, free from the numerous blood and hormonal tests in the world of today. Fortunately, as a microbiologist, I have sound knowledge of physiological processes and medical intervention systems used to counter lifestyle and other morbidities. I have not analysed the sugars, hormones, nucleic acids, salts but also involved in the isolation of pathogens, conducted serological tests, antibiotic sensitivity assays and understood the myriads of causes of hormonal imbalances. The purpose of this essay is not to sing verses of self praise and aggrandisement but to impress upon my readers that with the advancements of diagnostic processes and procedures, mankind has gone far and further down the abysms of ignorance and accelerated the causes of our morbidities.
In the 1940s, penicillin was considered as a wonder antibiotics and chemotherapy was accepted as a boon to all ills. Today, the scientist in me is anxious and inquisitive to challenge the callous and careless ways of quacks and those in the medical fraternity at will, prescribing drugs and medicines. We thus are generating spontaneous new mutants, variants and antibiotic and drug resistant microbes, which would usher in new pandemics and acute mortalities in generations to come.
Most medical doctors in India never ever enter research laboratories and study physiological processes or conduct drug sensitivity assays. How many of us are aware that the medical representatives of pharma giants dictate to the doctors, which medicines for diabetes, heart problems or any ailment he has to prescribe.
I will not delve into the dirty business of pharma giants - doctors nexus of generic and trade mark drugs, but warn the common man of Goa that every drug today may be good for the disease it is prescribed for, but how many of us know that many of these drugs prescribed have serious slow but sure side effects as there are over 10000 or more physical, biophysical, biochemical, genetic and varieties of hormonal, neurological reactions in our body and medicine meant to counter one ailment often has adverse ill side effect on other biochemical processes in our body. The polluted Goan environment adds to our coffin of woes and misery. The adverse effects of bone disabilities, neurological dysfunction and cancers are some of the rash intake of drugs and over use unintentionally. We must accept that of the myriads of tests now prescribed, going on to our body are ever going to be perfect in all entirety. With worries, stresses, pollution of food, water and soils, air troubles stand compounded. I had a year ago asserted that with 3000 million years of evolutionary history, viruses will invariably mutate and survive.
Many transposons in our body are integrated viruses. This is called the survival instinct of living beings. Hence we must learn to live and adopt ourselves - body, mind and environment. Let us not deceive ourselves into believing that vaccination is paranoia for all illnesses. Microbes have well refined escape mechanisms and attack us with greater vengeance, with acquired resistances. I will again delve into the finer aspects of human responses to diseases by drug resistant microbes in my next essay. But I advise my readers to understand the basics of immunology and human interaction with the viruses by reading my article titled ‘Human response to Covid 19.”
Mutation is a very complex phenomena happening at the level of nucleic acid, involving the processes of transcription, translation and involves reading of the genetic code and the ultimate formation of the proteins. These structural proteins are required to protect the viruses from escaping the detection by human immunological responses. The involving themselves in self preservation is the mantra of microbiological mutancies.
(The Writer is a retired University Professor and an Environmental Activist.)
