Tag Archives: plague

bird flu

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A strain of bird flu has spread from “intensive poultry farms in Asia” to wild birds in Britain. This is unquestionably bad for birds, and…

At present, it is thought H5N1 only rarely infects people and few cases have been recorded of it being passed from one human to another. However, scientists warn there is a possibility that bird flu viruses could change and gain the ability to spread easily between people. Monitoring for human infection is extremely important, they warn.

Guardian

Was Covid-19 a dress rehearsal for the day a really dangerous flu gets out of hand? I think we learned some things, but did we learn enough?

zoonotic diseases

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This article in France24 draws a link between habitat loss, climate change, and zoonotic diseases.

“Deforestation reduces biodiversity: we lose animals that naturally regulate viruses, which allows them to spread more easily,” he told AFP…

As animals flee their warming natural habitats they will meet other species for the first time — potentially infecting them with some of the 10,000 zoonotic viruses believed to be “circulating silently” among wild mammals, mostly in tropical forests, the study said.

Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University who co-authored the study, told AFP that “the host-pathogen network is about to change substantially”.

France24

I don’t quite get the logic of the first sentence – how do animals “naturally regulate viruses”? I can see the logic that some animals would limit the spread of viruses they are infected with based on their behavior. If they start moving around more, whether because their habitats are becoming smaller and more fragmented, because their ranges are shifting as the climate changes (although this seems like a much slower process to me), they will potentially interact more with other wild animals, with domestic animals, and with humans.

So solutions could be to protect natural habitats and keep cities from sprawling into them, shift more to vegetarian diets for people and/or keep livestock indoors (maybe not so great for the livestock).

May 2022 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.

Most hopeful story: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I found one easily accessible and understandable source of Covid-19 wastewater surveillance data.

plague lit

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Wired has an article on science fiction novels involving plagues, and over at the New Yorker is a long article from the more literary genre (Steven King appears to have breached this category!).

Wired mentions:

  • three Neal Stephenson novels: Seveneaves, Anathem, and The Fall, or, Dodge in Hell
  • The Expanse (which I have heard great things about but probably won’t read because the show has spoiled it for me)
  • Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (who I recently learned is a dude. I read the first book, and liked it, but didn’t love it enough to read the other two. It is one of those books I find myself thinking about though.)
  • Ender’s Game (big fan)
  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I’ve been burned out just a bit on Heinlein, but maybe I’ll give this one a chance at some point.)
  • William Gibson. No specific books, just William Gibson. (I like that I have read William Gibson, but I don’t )

The New Yorker mentions:

  • A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, 1722. (Yes, it’s about that plague. Also know as the plague.)
  • The Last Man by Mary Shelley, 1826.
  • Oedipus Rex (mentions the plague apparently)
  • Angels in America (yes, AIDS counts as a plague, complete with a long incubation time, asymptomatic transmission, initial government denial and botched response, and eventual development of more effective treatments, although there is still no vaccine or absolute cure.)
  • The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, 1842.
  • The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, 1912. (sort of a sequel to the Poe story, apparently)
  • The Plague by Albert Camus, 1947. (I didn’t realize Camus was that recent, but that is just me being ignorant.)
  • Blindness by Jose Saramago, 1995. (“brilliant” according to the New Yorker, but just sounds too depressing for right now.)
  • And of course, The Stand.

The science fiction book I keep thinking about though, which is not on either list, is Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. In Robots of Dawn, life on Earth is nasty, brutish and short. But there is a race (of humans) who have moved to space, and they live hundreds of years in part by avoiding virtually all physical contact with each other. They can do this because the human population is very low on a large planet, robots do all the work, and they have excellent video conferencing facilities. Humans basically never come into close physical proximity, with the one exception that husbands and wives get together only for the purpose of making babies, which is surprising because you would think a futuristic civilization where robots do all the work would have discovered in vitro fertilization. At the very least, you could send a robot over to your wife’s place with a turkey baster full of…well, you get the idea.

I’m thinking about a 2020 summer reading theme. I don’t think I want a plague theme! I could do worse than dig into some Neal Stephenson novels I’ve missed. I could always go back and read some Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve never read The Stand, so maybe.

ferrets and coronavirus

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Ferrets are highly susceptible to coronavirus. Apparently, ferrets are susceptible to similar respiratory diseases as humans in general and are used in research for that reason. Cats are also susceptible, but dogs and farm animals generally aren’t.

If this were a movie, humans would eradicate the virus but it would persist in a small community of feral cats somewhere, mutate into something even more horrible, and jump back to humans.

March 2020 in Review

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To state the obvious, March 2020 was all about the coronavirus. At the beginning of the month, we here in the U.S. watched with horror as it spread through Europe. We were hearing about a few cases in Seattle and California, and stories about people flying back from Italy and entering the greater New York area and other U.S. cities without medical screening. It was horrible, but still something happening mostly to other people far away on TV. In the middle of the month, schools and offices started to close. By the end of the month, it was a full blown crisis overwhelming hospitals in New York and New Jersey and starting to ramp up in other U.S. cities. It’s a little hard to follow my usual format this month but I’ll try. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Hmm…could it be…THE CORONAVIRUS??? The way the CDC dropped the ball on testing and tracking, after preparing for this for years, might be the single most maddening thing of all. There are big mistakes, there are enormously unfathomable mistakes, and then there are mistakes that kill hundreds of thousands of people (at least) and cost tens of trillions of dollars. I got over-excited about Coronavirus dashboards and simulations towards the beginning of month, and kind of tired of looking at them by the end of the month.
Most hopeful story:
  • Some diabetics are hacking their own insulin pumps. Okay, I don’t know if this is a good thing. But if medical device companies are not meeting their patient/customers’ needs, and some of those customers are savvy enough to write software that meets their needs, maybe the medical device companies could learn something.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I studied up a little on the emergency powers available to local, state, and the U.S. federal government in a health crisis. Local jurisdictions are generally subordinate to the state, and that is more or less the way it has played out in Pennsylvania. For the most part, the state governor made the policy decisions and Philadelphia added a few details and implemented them. The article I read said that states could choose to put their personnel under CDC direction, but that hasn’t happened. In fact, the CDC seems somewhat absent in all this other than as a provider of public service announcements. The federal government officials we see on TV are from the “Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases”, which most people never heard of, and to a certain extent the surgeon general. I suppose my expectations on this were created mostly by Hollywood, and if this were a movie the CDC would be swooping in with white suits and saving us, or possibly incinerating the few to save the many. If this were a movie, the coronavirus would also be mutating into a fog that would seep into my living room and turn me inside out, so at least there’s that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4chSOb3bY6Y

Bill Gates warning of pandemic risk in 2015

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In 2015, Bill Gates put the risk of a global pandemic “worse than Ebola” at 50% within his lifetime. Bill Gates is 64. Should we listen to Bill Gates because he is rich? Of course not. But we should listen to him because his foundation is focused on public health, preventing and preparing for the sort of thing that is unfolding right now.

coronavirus 2020!

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I try not to write a lot about fast-moving current events because anything I write will be instantly outdated (I’m writing this on the morning of March 1, 2020). But here are a few thoughts I have and things I am reading on the subject.

First, I plan to pay attention and do whatever the health authorities suggest I do. “Health authorities” means the CDC, my state health department, and my county health department. These sources aren’t infallible. Already, it appears the CDC could have used a test from the World Health Organization to monitor for the virus here, but they thought they knew better, dropped the ball completely, and there has been no monitoring. That means it could already be spreading undetected and the chance to contain it to just a few people could be lost. There is also concern about budget cuts to pandemic preparedness and public health in general by the Trump administration, and interference by political appointees and industry lobbyists. Despite all this, “the authorities” have the most expertise and are the most reliable source of information available. I have added these three sources (the CDC, my state and county health departments) to my Twitter feed. (I almost never use Twitter, but I do find it useful in a fast-moving situation like a snowstorm or oil refinery or power plant disaster – the first of which, there have been zero this winter and the second and third of which, there have been two, quite recently and quite close to my house.)

I have a decent backlog of food in my house and am trying to add a little extra. If “the authorities” tell me to keep my children home from school or myself home from work, I plan to do it. If they don’t I don’t plan to. I just hope the people who keep the water, power, gas, and communication systems running continue to go to work. An extended quarantine could be different from a fire, flood, or hurricane in this way, but of course it would be much longer. The CDC has not given any guidance on cabin fever, which can be an extraordinarily debilitating illness among children and their caregivers in confined spaces.

I wondered what powers the federal, state, and local authorities actually have and what the break down is between them. This Bloomberg article talks about that a little.

That’s in part because the president clearly has the power to declare a national health emergency and start ordering quarantines. This power comes from Congress, and is conferred on the president by the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. As the name suggests, this is the same law that lets the president declare disaster relief emergencies. President Donald Trump invoked this power in late January, when he declared a public health emergency and ordered the quarantine of Americans returning from areas of China where Covid-19 had already spread. Quarantines can also be authorized by the surgeon general, who is specifically given that power by federal law.

Bloomberg

The article says that local jurisdictions pretty much have to do what their state authorities tell them to do. The CDC can’t actually commandeer state officials, but that states can choose to place their officials under CDC direction, and they most likely would. So effectively, there really is a chain of command from top to bottom.

By definition, a quarantine limits the freedom of movement of people who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing to serve the overall good of avoiding more infections. Supreme Court doctrine directs that essentially all our individual liberties can be suspended if the government has a compelling interest to do so and if its measures are narrowly tailored to achieving that end. Slowing a pandemic is a textbook example of a compelling state interest; and quarantine is presumably the narrowest available method to do so in the middle of an outbreak.

Local police would seem to have the authority to enforce a quarantine, but how strictly they might do that and whether citizens would be able to challenge that on legal grounds has not been fully tested. I note that during “mandatory” hurricane evacuations, local police departments generally don’t drag people out of their homes against their will. Of course, in that situation they are just putting themselves and their families at risk, not others. If someone was walking down a busy street wearing a suicide vest, of course the police would shoot that person because they are a danger to others.

the Nipah virus

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One of the public services I provide is to bring you new diseases to worry about. Just in case Ebola is not horrifying enough (and with apologies to anyone who has been personally touched by it), there is concern about a new disease originating from human-wildlife contact as tropical forests are encroached on, in this case in Bangladesh.


Nipah virus encephalitis is one of eight diseases that the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified as epidemic threats in need of prioritization. The list includes Ebola, SARS, Zika, and an as-yet unknown affliction referred to as “Disease X.” All eight have been prioritized because of their inherent epidemic potential, and also the fact that there are currently insufficient measures in place to prevent them…

Because bats typically live in large colonies and roost in close proximity to one another, microbes are easily passed among members of the group. While virus numbers are typically kept in check by each bat’s immune system, when an animal is stressed, its defenses can become compromised. Much as a cold might make us cough and sneeze, a bat’s weakened immune system can cause the animal to shed viruses into its surroundings through saliva, urine, and feces…

The symptoms of the disease are now well documented, although they vary considerably from patient to patient and strain to strain. While some infected humans are completely asymptomatic, most initially develop symptoms including fever, headaches, vomiting, and sore throat. Some develop acute respiratory infections in the early stages of the disease; others never do. After a few days to a couple of weeks, many patients start to exhibit more serious signs of encephalitis—dizziness, drowsiness, altered consciousness, and other neurological changes. Within another day or two, the disease often progresses to coma, then death.