The other day there was another national news story on the "end" of anti-biotics. "For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control is warning you could get an infection that even our most powerful drugs can't kill," reported CBN.  "There might not be a thing doctors can do if it happens to you."

It's a "prayer need."

An associate director for the CDC, Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, told the news program, Frontline: "For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about 'The end of antibiotics, question mark?'"

"Well, now I would say you can change the title to 'The end of antibiotics, period.' We're in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t."

At the top of the list, say the reports, is something called "C-Diff," a bacterial infection that targets the intestinal tract and kills 14,000 people a year. That's followed by drug-resistant gonorrhea -- an infection making up about one-third of the cases of this sexually transmitted disease. Then there's "CRE," a respiratory bacteria infecting 9,000 hospital patients each year, killing half of them. "I've called CRE a nightmare bacteria," another official explained. "It can resist all antibiotics, kill a high proportion of people it infects, and spread from person-to-person and bacteria-to-bacteria readily."

There is MRSA, running rampant in hospitals, exercise rooms, and gymnasium dressing rooms.

Right now, experts are looking at new technologies, including the use of nano-particles, that may soon control these afflictions. Often, modern technology comes to the rescue, or seems to. But too often, in looking at future scenarios, we forget plague. It was an epidemic of flu that killed more than twenty million from 1918 to 1920 (including two of the three Fatima visionaries). Meanwhile, bubonic plague, responsible for devastating the Roman Empire, and then ravaging medieval Europe -- though now nearly totally controlled -- still exists in certain areas. In the early Church, many of the Virgin Mary's miraculous interventions  were in connection with outbreaks of plague.

"We always want to believe that history happened only to 'them,' 'in the past,' and that somehow we are outside of history, rather than enmeshed within it," wrote Dr. Jonathan M. Mann of Harvard in the introduction for a tome called The Coming Plague. "Many aspects of history are unanticipated and unforeseen, predictable only in retrospect. Yet in this one vital area, the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases, we can already predict the future -- and it is threatening to us all. The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases. What is new is the increased potential that at least some of these diseases will generate large-scale, even worldwide epidemics."

With prayer, God will guide us to safety, even from this.

But, in prayer, it must be a consideration.

Do we have medical supplies "just in case"? Are we careful about exposure during visits to doctor's offices and hospitals? (Not paranoid, which accomplishes nothing, but aware?) Among the saints to invoke: Saint Roch and the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

"Time is short," argued the author of The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett, some years back, in the award-winning book.  "As the homo sapiens population swells, surging past the six-billion mark at the millennium, the opportunities for pathogenic microbes multiply. From the microbes' point of view, it's as if the entire planet, occupied by nearly six billion mostly impoverished [people], is like the city of Rome in five B.C."

"The world is really just one village," noted another expert, Joshua Lederberg.

In fact, due to air travel, something from Africa can be in a rural part of the U.S. -- or just about anywhere else -- in days.

It was in the sixth century A.D. that Rome was attacked by an eruption of plague that helped with its demise, a plague that was finally thwarted only after Pope Gregory the Great paraded through the ravaged city with an icon of the Virgin Mary (one that later ended up at a town in Spain ironically named "Guadalupe," like the place where Mary would later appear in Mexico). "That's when the chastisement ended," notes The Last Secret, a history of Mary's appearances. "As the procession crossed an old stone-arched bridge over the Tiber and arrived at the mouth of Via Conciliazione near St. Peter's, the processionists caught sight of a mirage above an old round funerary: the incredible sight of an angel identified as Michael putting away his sword and marking the end of God's Justice."

[resources: The Last Secret and Fear of Fire; also: Michael Brown retreat, Charlotte, N.C.]

[photo at top, a dark stormy night at a volcanic site in Iceland, by Stephane Vetter]

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