With influenza and many other diseases the order is reversed, high infectivity preceding symptoms by a matter of days. A perverse pattern: the danger, then the warning. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918–1919 influenza: high infectivity among cases before they experienced the most obvious and debilitating stages of illness.
If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city – more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions – it might have escaped containment and burned through a.
Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts.
Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best – and, if he dies, don’t clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut.
Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?
Later in conversation he corrected himself: It was in fact 1.1 million pigs. The difference might seem like just a rounding error, he told me, but if you ever had to kill an “extra” hundred thousand pigs and dispose of their bodies in bulldozed pits, you’d remember the difference as significant.
It wasn’t a petty squabble. It was a big squabble, in which pettiness played no small part.
The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast – above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill – has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.
This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.
When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.
Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.
The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels – that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.
The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it’s an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants and their pollinators, between fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds. Each such relationship constitutes a link between trophic levels.
Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.
Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.
Habitat doesn’t replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.
Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus.
The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode –.
Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.
As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we’re getting their diseases.