What’s On My Bookshelf?
Part 1 | A Review: Plagues Upon the Earth, by Kyle Harper
The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse Highlights
Up to around 1700 life on earth was short and full of sorrow. Life expectancy was below 30 years. Most people died of infectious disease...around 1900 a great threshold was crossed for the the first time in the history of our species: non-infectious causes of death accounted for a greater portion of total mortality than did infectious diseases. By mid-century dying of infectious disease had become anomalous, virtually scandalous, in the developed world. The control of infectious disease is one of the unambiguously great accomplishments of our species
We do not and cannot live in a state of permanent victory over our germs. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberation from infectious disease...In short, germs evolve, and human mastery is always, therefore, incomplete.
Malaria: The deadliest of the human infectious diseases...no other affliction has exerted such influence on the species. It is “the mother of fevers,” “the king of diseases.” It continues to devastate human societies unfortunate enough to remain under its spell.
Tuberculosis: The burden of this disease on human health, in the past and present, is staggering. Today, there may be 2 billion humans latently infected, so more than a quarter of humanity could be carrying the pathogen. There are more than 10 million new cases annually, and TB still takes 1.5 million lives each year. TB may be in aggregate, the most lethal enemy our species has ever encountered.
As farming spread human numbers soared and the result has been a virtually unceasing acceleration of parasite evolution...There is universal agreement that farming was an unmitigated disaster for human health; humans sought more calories and came away with less nutritional variety, harder work, and more germs.
Which of the following did NOT contribute to the eventual improvement of life expectancy in the city?
The pandemic of 1918 to 1919 was the ultimate manifestation of a disease event in the age of steam ships and railroads. It was in absolute terms one of the single most deadly events in global history, claiming the lives of maybe 50 million victims
Modern growth has only made the challenge of controlling infectious disease greater. Urbanization, demographic expansion, modern transportation and intensified pressure on natural resources have made the ecology of infectious disease progressively more dangerous for humans.
We do not and cannot live in a state of permanent victory over our germs. Prophets have continually forewarned us that new diseases were one of the most fundamental risks we face as a species. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic makes it all too evident that their alarms were both prescient and unheeded. We were, in short, complacent...For scholars who study the past
or present of infectious disease, the pandemic was a perfectly inevitable disaster...we can never entirely escape the risk of global pandemics