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Severe forms of the new coronavirus show that a growing part of the population suffers from noncommunicable diseases such as obesity, a comorbid factor. The philosopher speaks of a syndrome rather than a pandemic.
Coronavirus can take severe forms in people who are obese, have problems such as diabetes or have respiratory failure, who are ill with air pollution or tobacco.
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Even the excellent “Philosophy magazine” is interested in Covid-19. Octave Larmagnac-Matheron cites in the preamble an article published in the leading medical journal “The Lancet”, in which his editor-in-chief writes that Covid-19 is not a pandemic but a syndrome. “Certainly its spread has become a global problem (cooking pan in Greek it means “all”). But it is not enough to note its rapid spread on a global scale: if the virus has developed with such virulence it is because it exploits the intertwining of many other pathological factors that have a structural impact on human health. “
It is a union “- from the Greek syn, “With”. This is confirmed by a detailed study also published in “The Lancet” on October 17: “The interaction of Covid-19 with the global increase has continued over the past thirty years in chronic diseases and their risk factors, including whose obesity, high blood sugar and air pollution created the conditions for a storm, fueling the death toll of Covid-19 “. And the scientists behind the study add that “many risk factors and noncommunicable diseases studied in this report are associated with an increased risk of severe Covid-19 and even death.”
“Our societies were, perhaps without realizing it, sick before they really got sick. Before becoming victims of a foreign body, they poisoned themselves by their lifestyle. Covid-19 is revealing, the tip of the iceberg: its eruption shows us how the relationship between health and disease is more ambiguous than it seems ”, writes the author of the“ Philosophy magazine ”.
“For at least three decades”, continues the author of the article, “non-communicable” diseases have been multiplying all over the world.: development of obesity and diabetes, multiplication of tumors due to countless pollution of human origin – while other important diseases related to alcohol and tobacco are perpetuated. These different factors intertwine and worsen each other, so that it becomes almost impossible to deal with them separately. Inequalities in access to care don’t help: if you can’t seek care for a disease, how to fight embedded pathologies? It is to describe this “intertwining of diseases in interactions and mutual worsening “, against which medicine is not armed, which the American anthropologist Merrill Singer invented, in 1990, the notion of syndemia.
What is most striking about the global syndrome that we live, it is because it brings into play pathologies that we would perhaps hesitate to say are diseases. We spontaneously think of illness as an event, a deterioration in health, linked to the interference of a foreign body – a virus, a bacterium – that undermines the body’s integrity. Nothing to do, for example, with obesity, which is more like a process than an event. “
What does the philosopher say? In his book The Knowledge of Life, published in 1952, George Canguilhem wrote: “Health is the luxury of being able to get sick and recover. On the contrary, any disease is the reduction of the power to overcome others “. And the philosopher adds that” living already for animals, and even more so for man, is not just vegetating and conserving oneself, it is taking risks and triumphing. on them “, is being able to resist the shocks and adversities of becoming. Being in good health means being able to choose the way in which to live our life, without worrying about what this choice exposes us. The patient, on the other hand, already sick before having contracted the virus that perhaps will kill him, he is forced to live locked up (word more adapted than ever) in “a restricted environment” dictated by the exclusive need for survival.
The risk for a part of the population with comorbid factors has pushed many governments into periods of blockade, which somehow reveals the disease of our lifestyles. “Would our modern lifestyles, with their many chronic pathologies, have created structurally weakened bodies, already sick before getting sick? The stagnation of “good health” life expectancy in more developed countries seems to support this idea, “writes Octave Larmagnac-Matheron.
He concludes that if the Covid-19 pandemic is obviously a tragedy, thought of as a syndemia, it must give us a horizon for the future: “Our bodies are weakened by our lifestyles; more than health policies to fight disease, we need policies that can develop the health of all. “We will add that the fight against pollution, junk food or smoking and alcoholism are ultimately good remedies against future pandemics …
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