I am sure that this book has been discussed before … but I just finished reading “The Coming Plague” by Laurie Garrett. For us non-science types, this is an incredible insight into the infectious disease research community and their battle with a variety of emerging diseases.
One thing that really jumped out to me were the names that pop-up in past disease episodes … many that also play a role in the H5N1 discussion. Of particular note, Dr. Osterholm’s role in the Toxic Shock episode is really fascinating. He took an unpopular stance and went head to head with the CDC to get them to recognize that the Toxic Shock problem was not just with one product … but with the whole class of high absorbency tampons. Of course his position was eventually vindicated.
On a somewhat prescient and haunting note the author concludes with the following passage:
‘’‘While the human race battles itself, fighting over ever more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.
It’s either that or we brace ourselves for the coming plague.’‘’
I can’t recommend this book more highly if you are interested in why we are … where we are with battling H5N1.
I certainly would love to know what Laurie Garrett’s PPF is these days!!!
Great Book. She was very prescient!
Her latest Book is also very pertinent right now. I can’t remember the exact title, but its something like “Betrayal of Trust: the collapse of the public health system”
Along with Barry’s book “The Great Influenza”, its a complete education!
Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
The reviews on amazon.com were quite favorable (of course, those can always be from shills, but it is a good place to start).
What we’re building in fluwikie is another important part of our education - at least for me. I have this idea to summarise some loooooong threads, as if for newbies, for ourselves.
Laurie is with the CFR.
(Aha - not case fatality rate - Good morning!) “Council on Foreign Relations” ! “Senior Fellow for Global Health,
good, yes; her books should be being read in high schools, and by local officials and “stakeholders”; people who have a stake in having a “normal” life they don’t want to lose.
“The Coming Plague” by Laurie Garrett was good, and I just remembered, I liked this even better than Barry’s;
Lynette Iezonni’s, “Influenza 1918; The Worst Epidemic in American History”
(heh, for “pre”-American history, read “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles Mann; those pandemics were even worse)
crfullmoon.
Could you give a short overview of the pandemics of pre-Columbian North America…Thanks
How did they come up with the data?
TomDVM: I’m not crfullmoon, but I’ll excerpt one of my favorite parts of the book “1491″ by Charles C. Mann here. It’s a long excerpt, but there are some very new ideas there that we all did not grow up with. While these theories are disputed, they do engender thought.
crfullmoon: I’m beginning to think we own all the same books!
From “1491″:
On May 30, 1539, Hernando De Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay in Florida…He sailed to Florida with six hundred soldiers, two hundred horses, and three hundred pigs….De Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice - he brought pigs.”
According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who spent fifteen years reconstructing De Soto’s path, the expedition built barges and crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis….and poled over the river into what is now eastern Arkansas, a land “thickly set with great towns,” according to the account, “two or three of them to be seen from one.” Each city protected itself with earthen walls, sizable moats, and deadeye archers. In his brazen fashion, De Soto marched right in, demanded food, and marched out.
After De Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 white people appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. In one seat was Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle passed through the area where De Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted - the French didn’t see an Indian village for two hundred miles….. De Soto “had a privleged glimpse” of an Indian world…. “The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen”
Today most historians and anthropologists believe the culprit was disease…the source of contagion was very likely not De Soto’s army but its ambulatory meat locker: his three hundred pigs. De Soto’s company was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his six hundred men long before they reached the Mississippi. But that would not have been true for his pigs.
Pigs were as essential to the conquistadors as horses…(humans and pigs)…had lived together in Europe for millennia….Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in constant contact with many animals….The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas…By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis,and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.
The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition…extended across the whole Southeast…The Caddo [TX-AR border] had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De Soto’sarmy left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula…the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500 - a drop of nearly 96 percent….an equivalent loss today would recduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the UCLA, said to me. “Everything else - all the heavily populated urbanized societies - was wiped out.”
Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction?
…Why hypothesize the existence of vast, super-deadly pandemics that seem unlike anything else in the historical record? The speed and scale of the projected losses “boggle the mind” observed Colin G. Calloway, a historian at Dartmouth - one reason, he suggested, that researchers were so long reluctant to accept them.
Note on the “1491″ excerpt: his math is wrong, but the ideas are still interesting!
Wait - no, he is correct - my mistake entirely (the problem with excerpts). His entire thought:
“…The Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500 - a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000..”
Tom DVM, I found the old, “America’s Previous 90% CFR” thread, where I said about the book, 1491, “it has points about the pre-contact population levels, (even some interesting farming practices I hadn’t heard of before) and the point made above about the different domestic animals the Europeans “lived with” and brought with them, and the diseases, and, about different haplogroups, I think the term was.
The impression made of continents of people with no experience/immunity to new viruses, no idea of contagion/quarantine, was something to read, given the current situation. (As well as being a book I wish was being taught in schools.) “
The farming practices produced what is now called “terra preta do Indio”, a fertile non-naturally-occurring soil, that can be found as old as 360 BCE.
(snip, snip; get the book at the library; worth a read, )
…”What happened after Columbus was like a thousand kudzus everywhere.”… “Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere.”…”When disease swept Indians from the land, this entire ecological ancien régime collapsed.”…
Pizarro said, “had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win this land.”…
crfullmoon. Thanks I will definitely read the book.
Oh that was so interesting, thank you for sharing.
I am going to check on those. I am excited to read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Think I might go check on it tomorrow ;).
Not that the above is our immediate destiny, but
I forget what philosoper said “that no man is so old that he does not think he can live another day”.
Perhaps this applies to civilizations as well.
in case anyone can’t think of a book to read, or buy for a library..
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