Coronavirus is Not the Problem

Coronavirus, originating in the crowded streets of China and being spread by jets that travel faster than viral incubation is not what wakes me up in a cold sweat.  That honor goes to the day that Avian flu becomes transmissible from human to human.

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson is a non-fiction book about the search for the source of the cholera epidemic in London in 1854.  In the last chapter of the book he talks about why workers in the poultry industry in Asia are given flu shots.  The shots don’t keep them from getting avian flu, they keep them from getting the basic, human influenza.  Why?  Because doctors and scientists want to make sure that there is no way for the deadly avian flu to mutate into a human carried influenza.  Avian flu, while lethal to humans can only be passed from bird to human through physical contact and is rare in humans.  This is the opposite of human influenza which, while less lethal, can be transmitted from human to human through the air. 

Epidemics are a man-made phenomenon.  While germs have been a part of mankind’s world since we emerged as a species, it was our creation of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, that made epidemics possible.  More food made denser populations creating the critical mass necessary for epidemics.  The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed 2% of patients.  By contrast, on the rare occasions when avian flu passes to humans, it kills 50% of them.  Dr. Donald A. Henderson, one of the leaders in the eradication of smallpox, describes H5N1 virus (avian flu) as the ultimate organism for the destruction of humans on this planet.  The day avian flu becomes an airborne, human to human pathogen is the day nature decides it is time to thin this human herd in an almighty ugly way.   

How far off is this inevitability?  We now learn that the H5N1 virus (avian flu) has been transmuted in a lab to airborne form.  The deadliest flu on the planet has now been changed, by scientists, to a form that can be spread through any school, airport or office by a good, hearty sneeze.  We have created Frankenstein.  While the research that created this monster was done at the Erasmus Medical Research Lab in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, it was paid for by the Dutch government and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

Here in lies the real danger.  There are some crazy people out there who think this world would be better off without people.  They hate themselves so much that they transfer that hate to the whole human race.  We just need one “Occupy Wall Street” socialist simpleton, one PETA fanatic, one anarchist with annihilation on his mind, or one of any other garden variety nut case and things get very bad, very quickly. 

I am a firm believer in the positive power of cutting-edge scientific research.  I believe that there is such a thing as knowledge for the sake of knowledge and all of this should be encouraged.  But deliberately setting out to create a delivery system for a disease that kills 50% of all humans needs some thought and redundant protection systems.  It is certainly true that only a fool would unleash a weapon that indiscriminately kills both friends and foe.  But fools we seem to have in abundance.  Hoping that such a genie, once loosed from the bottle, won’t be used, is living in a fantasy.  The fact that my tax money paid for this, on foreign soil, with no guarantees of what happens next, is galling.  We have met the enemy and he is us.

Watch carefully.  Think clearly.  Take the long view.  Keep the faith.