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Most mortal diseases kill off the very young and the very old, but instead of the usual U-shaped graph, this one resembled a crude W, with an average age of death of twenty-nine.
in a starving environment, the only people robust enough to seize the limited food resources are the young.
the so-called index case—an eighteen-month-old boy from Guinea who had been infected by fruit bats.
HIV was spreading more rapidly here than in any other part of the world, which the government used to justify its persecution of homosexuals and transgender people.
Ron Fouchier, at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, modified the Indonesian virus in the laboratory, awarding it new functions, including the abilities to be airborne and transmissible among mammals. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, at the University of Wisconsin, did something similar with a Vietnamese strain of the same virus. The two men did this to create a template for a vaccine in case of a future pandemic, but as they were about to publish their findings, including their methodology, The New York Times scolded the scientists for undertaking such a “doomsday” experiment. Such a virus “could kill
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“Everybody thinks it was just the dinosaurs, but five times in the history of the earth most of its living creatures were made extinct,”
Jill knew from Henry that the mask was not much protection. He would have needed a full-face respirator and a Tyvek suit if he was working in a hot zone.
The lab guys tell us that botulism is the most potent poison there is. A single gram can kill a million people.
The singular character of RNA viruses was that they were constantly reinventing themselves over and over again in what was called a “mutant swarm.”
Twenty years before, no one thought there were viruses in the oceans, but researchers had since shown that a single liter of seawater contained about 100 billion of them.
When a virus infected a cell, it inserted its own genes, and then used the energy of the cell for reproduction—in effect, turning the victimized cell into a virus factory.
The legacy of ancient infections might be found in as much as 8 percent of the human genome, including the genes that controlled memory formation, the immune system, and cognitive development. We wouldn’t be who we are without them.
Many novel diseases came to an end as abruptly as they had appeared.
DISEASES HAVE A history of stirring up conspiracies. Jews were held responsible for the Black Plague in the fourteenth century, and they were massacred in hundreds of European cities, including two thousand Jews burned alive in Strasbourg, France, on Valentine’s Day, 1349.
Henry and others pressed WHO to issue a travel advisory, one of the most draconian measures available to the organization.
Had the Chinese been more open about the disease when it first appeared, many people might have spared.
And, of course, diseases arrived from all parts of the globe, creating a vast international bazaar of infection.
Henry had told her that his parents had been missionaries in South America, and that they perished in an air crash when he was four years old.
Is this the truth?
He asked about how the boy had become infected—apparently, through a dog bite—and
And this eventually became flesh eating? necrotizing fasciitis
the stain on Russian Jews like herself, going back to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who betrayed the United States by handing over nuclear weapons designs to the Soviets.
Influenza had many strategies for propagation, but the most insidious was its ability to mutate, constantly reinventing itself, slipping past the body’s attempts to create immunity and science’s efforts to make effective vaccines.
In February 1976, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, a young recruit named David Lewis collapsed and died after a five-mile march.
it was called “swine flu,” because pigs had been the reservoir for the disease.
A month later, people began to fall ill—not from the flu, but from the vaccine, which was implicated in causing a paralytic disease called Guillain-Barré Syndrome. In December, the vaccination program was halted. During this time, no one else got swine flu. It was a political disaster for Ford and a caution to future political leaders.
https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/exhibits/swineflu/sf.asp
Johan Hultin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Hultin
Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Taubenberger
“The normal flu season usually starts in late October and peaks in February, sometimes running till May.
“That’s what they found in 1918, as you know. There were precursors. Milder, of course. And older people did have some immunity, suggesting that there must have been a similar strain circulating in the nineteenth century. But then the virus mutated and turned itself into a killer.”
The problem is that we might be able to design a vaccine for the virus we have on hand, but we can only guess at where it’s going.”
In desperation, some doctors at the time resorted to the idea of transfusion, transferring the blood serum from survivors into symptomatic patients.
In 1918, Philadelphia, a city of about two million people, hobbled by corrupt and incompetent officials, had been crushed by the Spanish flu.
By now the origin of the disease—in an Indonesian detention camp for Muslim homosexuals—was well known, and the conspiracists were inflaming fears that Kongoli was a plot.
We’ve had plans for years, at the CDC and NIH and Johns Hopkins and Walter Reed, we’ve had lots of plans. We just haven’t ever been given the resources and personnel to carry them out. Like ventilators.
Twenty to 30 percent of people who were infected with influenza never manifested symptoms.
“Some people carry this philosophy too far. They look at the damage mankind does to the natural world, and they forget that humans are animals as well, and also deserving of reverence.”
Disease wasn’t like that. Neighbors were afraid of each other.
“On the one hand, you suggest that the blessings you receive you did not earn, and on the other you believe that you are responsible for everything bad that happens. This is a very Islamic attitude.”
Fake news.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news
Anyway, there’s no gene for beauty. It’s not like height.”
The fact that the sunrise was still beautiful was like God saying, So what, I don’t need people in my world. My new religion, thought Helen: There is a God, and he hates us.
Earth’s Guardians,”
https://www.earthguardians.org/
and so far they suggest a death toll in excess of three hundred million people.” “Out of a population of eight billion, that’s a manageable portion,”
“Humans have become a problem,” he finally said. “Speaking as a human, selfishly, I hope that our species endures. But there is little doubt that the planet would be better off without us.”
submarine is the only vessel in the navy we call a boat.
“What scares people the most is having no control,” Henry said.
but their powerful immune response was killing them, just as in 1918, by filling the lungs with fluids to fight the infection but drowning the body in the process.
Without the sun’s ultraviolet rays, the body doesn’t produce vitamin D, which in turn limits the number of white blood cells available to fight infection.
What if the infection took another route? Instead of being inhaled, what if it were injected intravenously, where it would pass through the heart, activating the immune system? By the time the virus reached the lungs, the body’s defenses might be strong enough to repel the invading pathogen.
Someone did this, Henry thought. Nature can be cruel in its way, but his own experience had shown that the hand of man was also capable of ingenious and fatal destruction.
