The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [3]
PART ONE
The American Plague
Plague: A widespread affliction or calamity, especially one seen as divine retribution.
—The American Heritage Dictionary
The rain came in West Africa. A massive wind blew in from the Atlantic coast bringing the deluge of water known as the southwest monsoon. It swelled the Niger and Benue rivers; it spilled into the braided streams of the Niger Delta; it filled the flood-plains and swamplands of southeastern Nigeria. It purpled the sky and saturated the country.
Towering oil palms dripped water from their feathered branches, and the brush-marked trunks of rubber trees were streaked with rain. The broad, bush-topped cocoa trees moistened. And the forests of Nigeria grew heavy and humid. Water is nourishing, and it enriched the plant life emerging from West Africa’s dry season. It also nourished something else—dry, oval-shaped eggs clinging to life inside the hollows of trees. Once the rain fell, those eggs grew, and soon, mosquitoes hatched. In the natural world, a string of events had been set into motion.
The rains falling in Africa did not deter men from entering the forest and felling trees for timber. As the trees fell, their canopy of dense green fell with them, often bringing a swarm of gnats and mosquitoes with it. Some of those mosquitoes would bite.
The native Africans who worked the forests noticed an eerie silence in the trees. Usually alive with the piercing sound of birds, the hum of insects and the calls of monkeys, tree canopies in some areas were still, a haunting contrast to the living, breathing rain forest—a sign that something was not right in the ecosystem. The monkeys had grown ill, their shrill chatter quieted. Unknown to the men, the rain forest, teeming with smells, sounds, color and life, was also home to something much smaller. Microscopic. A tiny, thriving life-form.
No one knows for sure how the yellow fever virus first came into existence. No records of it in early history exist, nor is it among the biblical plagues. But then, how does any new life emerge? There is a creation and a birth and eventually a discovery in the dark forests of Africa.
A virus is one of the smallest beings in evolution’s survival of the fittest, mutating and coalescing in order to thrive, its ultimate goal being epidemic. Viruses affect nearly every life-form on earth from flora to fauna, but a virus in its own right is not actually alive—it only becomes alive by possessing something living. The virus seeks out a healthy cell, overtakes it, impregnating it, forcing the body’s cells to produce thousands of the new offspring. This rapacious battle will eventually allow the virus, something as small as one-ten-thousandth of a millimeter, to conquer something the size of a human.
It is uncertain whether viruses evolved from a single cell, becoming more complex, or whether they devolved into something simpler, more efficient, gracefully infectious. Either way, a virus is an evolutionary masterpiece; since it does not have the ability to have sex or reproduce on its own, it must constantly change, adapting to other life-forms—from something as small as bacteria to something as large as mammals. Taking it a step further, once the virus has mastered something like a mosquito in the case of yellow fever or a bird in the case of influenza, it may spread to other species. There, it adapts again and again until there is a seamless transition between certain species—perhaps a monkey to a mosquito to a man.
Once inside the bloodstream, a virus is programmed with elegantly simple genetic material, its DNA or RNA, to produce certain symptoms that will spread it further. In the common cold, sneezing and a runny nose spread the virus. In smallpox, open sores on the skin act as the vehicle for infection. With influenza, coughing expels the virus into the air. In the case of HIV, the virus