Disease of terror and the terror of disease

He would never have thought of himself as having something to teach us about terrorism. It is doubtful she ever really did either. He was just a kid, with a smile so big it seemed to wrap around to the back of his head. She was really a kid too, just 18, named Ayat. In the ER that night we had poked him, prodded him, stuck him with needles and still he smiled, somehow reassuring us that despite the deadly bacterial infection in his blood he was going to survive. He had to; he was a good kid (you could just tell by the way he said “Yes, ma’am” to the nurses), and he had good parents who loved him. In the West Bank Friday, Ayat had gone to school as usual, a student with a future.

In the end, though, none of that mattered. He died the next day, after a short life of 13 years in which no one seemed to have done anything wrong. He was struck down at random, despite our efforts to determine his destiny, a victim of the terrorism of disease. She died last Saturday, a suicide bomber at an Israeli mall, a perpetrator of the disease of terrorism. Despite the few years they both lived they had much to teach us about terrorism.

Most importantly, the lesson of all of these deaths, including his and those of 9/11/01, is that there is no complete protection against brutal killings, either by killer bacteria without hearts or desperate people without conscience, especially when everyone is a target. It matters not that our children have their shots and our borders have their guards; no protection is absolute in the face of constant, resolute assaults, either on our immune systems or our World Trade Centers. Even success 99.9 percent of the time means that one time in a thousand a killer gets through and some of us will die.

The lesson should be all the more apparent because of where the boy and girl died. America has one of the best medical systems in the world, the boy received the best of care in that system, and still he lost. Israel is an armed camp, and the Israelis pursue their terrorist tormenters with the same dedication as we pursued the boy’s meningitis. They assassinate terrorists when possible and send in tanks at will. Despite that the Palestinian bombers keep coming, always another Ayat waiting to replace the last, always enough that one more gets through.

By comparison, America is an easy target. If our borders were an immune system the bacteria would laugh out loud in contempt. For example, there are more than

6 million closed shipping containers that come into this country every year and only 2 percent are inspected before they end up in U.S. cities. Any one of them could hide a nuclear bomb we might only find too late as the epicenter of a million epitaphs.

Another lesson from the boy; the odds of success against the bacteria go down once they are inside us. So too with terrorists; they may live with us as travelers or immigrants, or they may be us. Timothy McVeigh, the deadliest bomber in American history, was as American as his hair was short. We can spend every billion we will ever have warring on terrorism and the truth is that one determined man from our midst with a bomb can make it all seem worthless.

The best protection against the terror of disease and the disease of terrorism is eradicating the sources of these illnesses of the blood and the soul. In the case of bacteria that is best done by a combination of vaccinations, a good public health system, good personal health and good hygiene such as hand washing. In the case of terrorism, prevention is best accomplished by inoculating against the diseases of despair, hopelessness and radicalism, with freedom, economic opportunity and respect. In the Middle East that means a Palestinian homeland and a safe Israel.

In the end, we can choose how to fight our wars against deadly terrorists and deadly bacteria, but what we choose will determine how many will die. If we choose the high-tech bombs and high-tech antibiotics, the soldiers in green and the doctors in white, more of us will die, one infection or one terrorist incident at a time. If we focus on the boring, slogging efforts of peace and preventive health, there will be fewer killers to come our way. The antibiotics and the guns must be the tools of last resort, because they are, despite the glamour, the least effective tools of all.

We will not have our best chance against terrorism until those who lead wars on terrorism and those who lead terrorists wash their hands of the ways of war, hate, arrogance, ignorance and bloodshed. Only then can they rid the world of the deadly plagues of poverty, hopelessness, ignorance, intolerance and lack of freedom, from whence come other smiling children on their way to violent death as the men and women of terror.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.