Fish to our rescue?

With lakes opening, winter-weary minds turn to fish. A fish netted in the open water floating your boat is genuine proof that spring is here.

Fish, however, provide us with benefits beyond the simple joys of rod and reel. They help maintain biosphere balance, provide vital protein for millions of humans, and even give comfort to folks with home aquariums.

Now there is news that fish might hold the key to saving millions of lives. Some scientists believe that fish slime has antiseptic powers that might be used to develop new, much needed antibiotics.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that antibiotic resistance in microbes such as bacteria is growing to dangerously high levels. More and more infections, such as pneumonia, blood poisoning, food poisoning and gonorrhea, are becoming harder to treat as antibiotics become less effective.

WHO says that antibiotics are becoming less effective because of overuse and misuse.

For instance, a U.S. study found that 23.2 per cent of antibiotic prescription fills in 2016 were “inappropriate” use of those medications. The most common conditions for which those antibiotics were prescribed were coughs, colds and chest infections. Antibiotics kill bacteria but are not effective again viruses that cause coughs and colds.

WHO has started a campaign to prevent and better control drug resistance by educating and advising individuals, health care professionals and policy makers, as well as investing in research to find new drugs and vaccines.

“Without urgent action, we are heading for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries can once again kill,” the health organization says.

AMR, the acronym for antimicrobial resistance, now causes 700,000 world deaths a year, WHO reports.  Some researchers believe that without urgent action now, drug resistant infections could kill 10 million people a year by 2050. That is more than the number of people around the world who die annually of cancer.

New antibiotics that infectious germs are not familiar with need to be developed. Most current antibiotics were developed from microbes that live in soil. Now the search has moved to other environments. That’s where the fish come in.

Fish produce a slimy mucus on their skin for a variety of reasons, the most important being protection against parasites, harmful bacteria and fungi. Microorganisms in the mucus have chemical mixtures that some scientists believe might be useful in developing new antibiotics.

Studies so far have found that certain chemical mixtures from fish slime have been found to tackle some staph infections, some E coli and even some colon cancer cells.

There’s a long way to go before we know whether fish slime can help develop new drugs needed to fight germs that have become resistant to the current ones. However, there is hope and considerable excitement about research work being done with fish slime.

Meanwhile, with the spring fishing season here we fishers need to remind ourselves that whether or not fish slime can produce beneficial drugs for us, it is still important to individual fish. We need to be careful how we handle fish in catch-and-release situations.

Slime is a protective barrier critical to good health of a fish. It keeps out tiny bacteria and keeps in essential fluids and electrolytes. A break in the slime coat is like a cut on human skin. Losing a swath of slime is like peeling off a large piece of skin from a human body.

It is difficult to land a fish without disturbing its slime, but there are ways to minimize slime damage.

Those inexpensive knotted, hard nylon nets are like running a rasp across fish skin. Coated nylon nets without knots are less damaging. Even better are rubber nets.

There also are fish grips for pulling in a fish by the lower lip and avoiding touching its body. The key to using them is to keep the fish horizontal, and not vertical, to avoid stress on its body.

Also, if a fish is laid on the boat floor for hook removal, keep it well wetted. Better still, cut the line and leave the hook in when you release the fish. Steel hooks rust and eventually fall out, which leads to another reminder: use regular steel hooks, not stainless steel which does not rust.

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Little Flu. For Now

It has not only been an unusually mild winter (except for last weekend), but an unusually mild influenza season. Everyone hopes it will stay that way.

Up to Feb. 1 there had been only 421 hospitalizations for flu reported in all of Canada. Reported flu deaths were 14 country wide.

That’s a huge improvement from last flu season when 7,719 people were hospitalized with influenza and 591 died. The year previous there  were 5,284 hospitalizations and 331 deaths.

Light flu seasons tend to make us forget just how dangerous influenza really is. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that each year there are three to five million cases of severe influenza worldwide. Anywhere between 250,000 to 500,000 people a year die from it.

You have to approach those big numbers with some skepticism. Flu statistics are never totally accurate. They are based on computer models and quite a bit of guesswork. For instance, if a terminally ill cancer patient comes down with a flu bug and dies, did she die from influenza?

The last serious flu outbreak was in 2009. It was the H1N1 virus that became a pandemic which WHO said killed 285,000 people worldwide. A pandemic is a worldwide outbreak as compared to an epidemic, which is when a disease affects more people than usual for a region.

   

No matter how light a flu season might be, none of us should ever become complacent about influenza. Last fall a report to the British government identified pandemic influenza as the highest priority natural hazards risk facing humans.

We are, however, far too complacent about the danger of avian influenza - the bird flu - and the virus breeding grounds of Asia.

Some health experts believe another flu pandemic is only a matter of time. Some have for years been predicting a flu pandemic that will infect more than one-third of the world’s population and kill hundreds of thousands.

It has happened before. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was a global disaster with 50 million deaths. There have been other flu pandemics since, including the 1967-68 Hong Kong flu, which I remember well because it sent me to the hospital.

Many believe the next flu pandemic will begin in China, the world’s main mixing bowl for bird flu.

Avian flu bugs live harmlessly in the bodies of waterfowl, such as ducks and geese.  When these birds mix with domesticated poultry, or sometimes pigs, the flu virus gets passed on and can mutate. Most of these influenza viruses do not affect humans, but some do and cause epidemics, and even pandemics.

The flu virus world is like alphabet soup. H1N1. H5N1. H7N9. The names keep changing as the viruses mutate until one comes along that is the Big One that allows easy human-to-human transmission.

China is an excellent bird flu factory because it has huge open air poultry operations where waterfowl can easily mix in. And southern China lies inside  major waterfowl migration routes, so there are many opportunities for waterfowl to pass along their viruses.

Worsening the situation is the world’s increasing appetite for chicken. Chicken rapidly is becoming the world’s most popular meat. Global poultry production is said to have quadrupled in the last few decades.

Poultry consumption and production is soaring in China. More of those open air - and in many cases unsanitary - markets or production areas increase the chances for bird flu virus production.

There is not much average folks can do to reduce the chances of a serious flu outbreak. We can only hope that agencies like WHO, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health agencies are diligent in their work.

We all should become better educated about flu. There are many misconceptions, such as cold weather being a cause of the flu. There often is more flu in colder weather but that’s only because people spend more time indoors, increasing contact and the chances of spreading germs.

Better educated and certainly more aware so we can prod our politicians. We don’t need our politicians and bureaucrats dozing like they were during the 2002-2003 SARS disaster.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca

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