tim's experiment

Had a small ailment the other day, and went down the hill to our local GP, from whom as is customary I received three days worth of assorted pills. These worked eventually and the problem cleared up.

When you think about it, this is actually rather miraculous. I weigh something in the region of 200 pounds. Most of this is water. The insertion of a pill, active ingredients scarcely bigger than a grain of rice, should make no impression at all. Yet a tiny pill can make a big difference, sometimes remarkably quickly. In my experience, for example, a couple of aspirins will dissipate a standard hang-over headache in about 30 minutes. Clearly our bodies, while in some ways remarkably robust, are in other ways very sensitive. A very small quantity of a strange chemical can produce drastic changes.

You would think, under these circumstances, that we would be more careful. But we aren’t. In fact industrialised societies produce huge quantities of chemicals which do not occurr in nature – and against which in consequence our bodies have no defences. If these chemicals are not actually poisonous they may cause dangerous confusion in our internal signalling system by mimicking some unsuspecting hormone. And of course they all get into the environment eventually.

I suppose something along these lines explains the prevalence of problems which were virtually or totally non-existent 50 years ago. When I was a kid I went through the entire educational process and encountered two people who had asthma. This was obvious because they were excused compulsory games. Nobody was allergic to nuts and none of us had the faintest idea what gluten was.

Times have changed. There was an interesting letter in the paper the other day from someone who had eaten something to which he was allergic in a local luxury hotel, despite asking the waiter about the ingredients. I think he asked about nuts but some sesame paste had sneaked in somewhere, so this may have been a rather simple misunderstanding. The writer, though, was quite offended, and asserted a right to be informed about the ingredients wherever he was eating. He had obviously had an unpleasant experience. But he seemed to be asking a lot. In food selling enterprises the person who brings the fodder to your table has very little to do with its production. And the range of things to which sensitive individuals might take exception is quite wide and in some areas rather technical. Yet the number of people with problems of this kind seems to have increased enormously. I realise there are other theories to account for this but it seems at least plausible that we are poisoning ourselves.

We are certainly poisoning me. Any visit to the urban area is enough to provoke my nose to bitter complaints these days. I suppose it’s the traffic fumes, a problem which Hong Kong seems to be quite unable to solve, or even meaningfully to confront. I was bemused to read the other day that the Police do not take action against people whose engines are left illegally idling, because the relevant ordinance designates the Food and Hygiene people as the enforcement authority. Come on, Force, this is too timid. If a policeman sees a crime being committed he is perfectly entitled to arrest the miscreant whether another department is officially in charge of the matter or not. This would be a more worthy use of your time than issuing meaningless parking tickets.