Bacterial pneumonia, for instance, accounts for about ninety thousand deaths annually just among Bangladeshi children under age five. Bacterial diarrhea kills about twenty thousand newborn infants every year. Given those numbers, I asked Luby, why divert any attention at all to Nipah? To be prudent, he said. Classic case of the devils you know versus the devil you don’t know, none of which can you afford to ignore. Nipah is important because of what might happen and because we understand little about how it might happen. “This is a horrible pathogen,” he said, reminding me that the lethality
...more
Why new diseases, seemingly having lesser impact, also need to be paid attention to
