What’s On My Bookshelf?
A Review: Plagues Upon the Earth, by Kyle Harper - The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse | Part 3 - Highlights
Coronaviruses and influenza viruses are the ones that we are currently worried about. H5N1 (a bird flu)...if it ever gets airborne...it’s got a 60% death rate. (Dr. Larry Brilliant, Harvard Magazine)
It is the advance of scientific knowledge, actualized by public policy and private behavior, that has given humans the advantage over microbial threats. Science and state-craft are the keys to the Great Escape.
Science
As of 1870, only a small Avant-garde of researchers believed that familiar diseases were caused by invisible living agents. But by 1900, for a scientist or medical professional to believe anything else was becoming ignorant.
The Hygiene Revolution - The principles of germ theory inspired renewed efforts to disinfect the personal and household environments.
The war against bugs - Insects that had once seemed a mere nuisance were now seen as vehicles with deadly payloads.
Chemical Control of Pathogens - Dysentery was still a major health problem in the developed world, and typhoid remained – until chlorination. The most important reason we can drink a glass of water today and not feel even a hint of dread is because it has been treated with chlorine.
Antibiotics - Starting in the 1940’s...Antibiotics delivered us from the long period of human history when the simplest wound was a mortal threat.
Vaccines - Small pox was a success story. So was the measles vaccine. The vaccine was licensed in the U.S. in 1963, and measles infections fell instantaneously. A disease that once caused 1 million cases a year in the United States was reduced to an annual incidence of fewer than 100. Globally, In the early 1980s, 2.5 million children died annually from the measles. By 2018, mortality has been reduced to 140,000 deaths.
Public Policy
Improvements in life expectancy are generated not by ideas alone but by ideas that are put into action, especially by capable governments that care about the heath of their citizens...The control of infectious disease, by its very nature, requires collective and coordinate action.
Investments in public water systems were among the largest, and might even have been the largest, public investments in American history and they had a larger impact on human mortality than any other public health initiative. The household toilet is a private portal into the sprawling subterranean circuitry quietly gathering our collective muck. Several times a day we sit astride a section of the largest and most expensive environmental infrastructure in the world – the vast underground systems of sewers and waste-water treatment plants that are a defining feature of the developed world.
The federal government erected an infrastructure for agricultural and veterinary science early on, and precocious American agro-science is an underrated storyline in the global emergence of germ theory and the biochemical control of infectious disease.
Paradoxically, we are in some ways more fragile than our ancestors, precisely because our societies depend on the level of security against infectious disease that may be unrealistic
We have much to learn from the experience of those who lived and died before us. It is urgent that we do so.