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The American appetite for bananas was insatiable. (And it still is; the banana is consistently the number one–selling item in Walmart superstores.)
US President William Howard Taft. In 1910 his secretary of state, Philander Knox, recruited J. P. Morgan in a scheme to buy Honduran debt from the British—which he did at fifteen cents on the dollar—and restructure it.
The air carried a thick, heady scent of earth, flowers, spice, and rotten decay.
All around us, the rainforest chattered with the calls of birds, frogs, and other animals, the sounds mingling together into a pleasing susurrus, punctuated by the call and response of two scarlet macaws, one in a nearby tree, the other distant and invisible.
The night clamor of the jungle was so loud I had to wear earplugs. Chris, on the other hand, confessed to me later that he recorded the night jungle on his iPhone and played it to himself back in Colorado to help calm him down when he was stressed or upset.
This brief exploration impressed Conservation International so much that its vice chair—Harrison Ford, the actor—sent a letter to President Hernández of Honduras praising him on his preservation efforts. Ford wrote that CI had determined it was one of the “healthiest tropical forests in the Americas,” and that the valley of T1 and surroundings were an “extraordinary, globally significant ecological and cultural treasure.”
He explained that one of medicine’s greatest mysteries is why some people get sick and others do not, given the same exposure. Environment and nutrition play a role in infection, but genetics are paramount. This is the very question at the heart of why so many New World people died of Old World disease.
we finally have the tools to figure out why some people are more vulnerable than others. Scientists are sequencing people’s entire genomes and comparing them, one against the other, to see what genetic differences pop out between those who, exposed to an infection, got sick and those who didn’t. We finally have the tools to understand the biology behind the great die-off and how such pandemics might be prevented in the future, but the research is still in its infancy.
It’s harder to design a vaccine against a protozoan than against a simpler virus or bacterium; in fact, not one major parasitic disease has a reliable vaccine yet.
The world is now divided into Third and First, not Old and New. Pathogens once confined to the Third World are now making deadly inroads into the First. This is the future trajectory of disease on planet Earth. Pathogens have no boundaries; they are the ultimate travelers; they go wherever there’s human fuel.
We First Worlders have become far too complacent in the idea that disease, especially NTDs, can be quarantined to the Third World, and that we can live safely in our communities supposedly gated against pathogens, ignoring the suffering of the poor and sick in faraway lands.
