Several years back I read a book called, "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett, which basically asserted that the law of averages and time was on the side of the microbes, given the incredibly rich design of nature's disease creation machines.
The book -- all 700 or so pages of it -- was simultaneously riveting, terrifying and abstract since, let's face it, viruses like Marburg or Ebola or "The Plague" are the stuff of far off places, science fiction movies or distant points in time.
Flash forward to the present. You may have read news clippings of avian flu in Asia, and heard background stories of a coming pandemic related to it. You may even be familiar with the oft-cited parallels to the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed 50 to 100 million people in a world one-third as populated as ours is today.
But it is probably an abstract topic to you. If so, and if you are interested in understanding such things a bit better, in the November Issue of Vanity Fair (an excellent magazine that proves the perils of judging a book by its cover, or name in this case), William Prochnau and Laura Parker have written an article called, "THE WAITING PLAGUE," that covers the avian flu strain known as H5N1 from the level of the field of vision where it exists today in China, Cambodia and Vietnam -- before taking off (literally) to places beyond.
Some excerpts:
- A human epidemic of bird flu in Cambodia would take just days to spread around a world linked by air travel.
- Last year the U.S. ordered 2.3 million dose packs of Tamiflu -- enough for less than 1 percent of the population for a week.
- H5N1 has already met two of three conditions necessary to start a pandemic and is toying with the third. First, it is a new strain unknown among humans for more than a century, meaning that no one is immune to it. Second, it has jumped species, from birds to humans and other mammals. Virologists are scrutinizing each human case carefully, looking for signs that it has made the final step -- spreading easily from person to person.
- The pandemics of past centuries have typically hit world populations like the epidemiological equivalent of a flash flood...They have started abruptly without warning, swept through populations with ferocious velocity, and left considerable damage in their wake. Past pandemics have infected up to half the people in the world.
Scary stuff, to be sure, but then again there are two responses you can take to such things -- stick your head in the ground ala The Brain in the Jar or understand, get educated and live your life.
Vanity Fair is $4.50 and this issue is recognizable by Beyonce on the cover. The story alone is worth the price of admission.
