• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 655 0

a competitive auction in doom-laden predictions. The winner, whose views were broadcast repeatedly as a result, was a bacteriology professor named Hugh Pennington who said things like ‘we have to prepare for perhaps thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of cases of vCJD coming down the line.’ Even the ‘official’ models warned that the true figure could be as high as 136,000 victims. In fact, as of this writing, the number of deaths has reached 166, of which just one was in 2008 and two in 2009. Only four people are now living with definite or probable vCJD. Each one is a tragedy, but a threat to humanity it is not.

(The numbers are surprisingly similar to those from Chernobyl. At least 500,000 people would die from cancers caused by the nuclear accident there in 1986, said the sobering early reports, and there will be many birth defects. The latest estimate is that less than 4,000 will die of Chernobyl cancer, compared with 100,000 natural cancer deaths among the exposed population, and that there were no extra birth defects at all. In addition, fifty-six died during the accident itself. The evacuation of the area has caused wildlife to flourish there to an extraordinary degree, without any unusual genetic changes at all in the rodents that have been studied.)

In the 2000s influenza, too, proved to be a paper tiger. H5N1 strains of the virus (‘bird flu’) jumped into human beings via free-range ducks on Chinese farms and, in 2005, the United Nations predicted five million – 150 million deaths from bird flu. Yet, contrary to what you have read, when H5N1 did infect human beings it proved neither especially virulent nor especially contagious. It has so far killed fewer than 300 people worldwide. As one commentator concluded: ‘Hysteria over an avian flu pandemic has been very good for the Chicken Little media, authors, ambitious health officials, drug companies ... But even as many of the panic-mongers have begun to lie low, the vestiges of hysteria remain – as do the misallocations of billions of dollars from more serious health problems. Too bad no one ever holds the doomsayers accountable for the damage they’ve done.’

I suspect this is too strong, and that flu may yet mount a serious epidemic in some form. But the H1N1 swine flu epidemic of 2009 that began in Mexico also followed the usual path of new flu strains, towards low virulence – about one death for every 1,000–10,000 infected people. This is no surprise. As the evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald has long argued, viruses undergo natural selection as well as mutation once established in a new species of host and casually transmitted viruses like flu replicate more successfully if they cause mild disease, so that the host keeps moving about and meeting new people. A victim lying in a darkened room alone is not as much use to the virus as somebody who feels just well enough to struggle into work coughing. The modern way of life, with lots of travel but also rather more personal space, tends to encourage mild, casual-contact viruses that need their victims to be healthy enough to meet fresh targets fleetingly. It is no accident that modern people suffer from more than 200 kinds of cold, the supreme viral exploiters of the modern world.

If this is so, why then did H1N1 flu kill perhaps fifty million people in 1918? Ewald and others think the explanation lies in the trenches of the First World War. So many wounded soldiers, in such crowded conditions, provided a habitat ideally suited to more virulent behaviour by the virus: people could pass on the virus while dying. Today you are far more likely to get the flu from a person who is well enough to go to work than one who is ill enough to stay at home. By contrast, it is no accident that water-borne and insect-borne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, typhus and malaria are so much more virulent, because they can spread from immobilised victims. Malaria spreads more easily if its victims are laid low in a darkened room – bait for mosquitoes. But in most of the modern world, people are increasingly