We have been living in an age of improbable luck. We have experienced nearly thirty years without a disease—that we do not know how to combat—killing upward of thousands of otherwise healthy young people in those core countries. I can’t say whether this good fortune will run out—I hope it won’t—but it always has in the past. We just like to forget this disagreeable fact. Forgetting is soothing and probably in our nature. But disregarding, and being ignorant of, plagues of the past makes us more, rather than less, vulnerable to inevitable ones in the future.
