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In a low-transmission environment, lethal strains die out, and mild ones come to dominate the population. In high-transmission environments, the lethal strains quickly outnumber the mild ones.
Flatten that damn curve, people!
The Victorian medical refrain was, essentially: Take a few hits of opium and call me in the morning.
Imagine the terror and panic if a biological attack killed four thousand otherwise healthy New Yorkers over a twenty-day period.
2020 renders this charmingly naive
The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak “Indian constitution” to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance mostly likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn’t live in towns.
Chadwick helped solidify, if not outright invent, an ensemble of categories that we now take for granted: that the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention.
But there was another debate that ran alongside those more austere themes, one that has not received as much attention in the seminar rooms or the biographies. It’s true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class consciousness. But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all of this shit?
Petition to CGI giant piles of shit into the background of every Charles Dickens adaptation
Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work.
But reports had surfaced of some customers discovering live eels in their drinking water, which suggested that the filters were not perhaps working optimally.
To say this is an understatement would be an understatement.
If H5N1 does manage to swap just the right piece of DNA from a type A flu virus, we could well see a runaway epidemic that would burn through some of the world’s largest cities at a staggering rate, thanks both to the extreme densities of our cities and the global connectivity of jet travel. Millions could die in a matter of months.
But for that to happen, people would have to willfully ignore basic things we've learned from centuries of dealing with infectious disease, like wearing masks and maintaining physical distance from one another. Sob.
It’s entirely likely, of course, that we will see the release of an infectious agent engineered in a rogue lab somewhere, and it’s at least conceivable that the attack could unleash a pandemic that could kill thousands or millions—particularly if such an attack took place in the next decade or so, before our defensive tools have matured.
