THIS hasn’t been a cracking week for optimists. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists pushed the hands of their symbolic Doomsday Clock the closest they’ve ever been to midnight (it’s now at 100 seconds). The causes they cite are nuclear weapons proliferation and a worsening climate crisis.
At least these apocalypses can be dialled down, by our intentions and actions. Politics – insurgent, electoral or both – can slow the making of nukes, or consciously regulate the toxicity of our productive sectors.
But when you hear biologists saying the next viral pandemic will infect billions, kill hundreds of millions and is entirely inevitable, the duvet slowly begins to creep over the head. They even have a cute acronym for it – the NBO (Next Big One). Cute doesn’t help.
So does the current coronavirus scare coming out of Wuhan city – with possible carriers being tested in Scotland, and 26 dead so far in China – look like being the NBO?
What might begin to lower your duvet is the way that authorities seem to genuinely learn from how they’ve dealt with recent pandemics (which are epidemics that go global).
The World Health Organisation has a clear list of current pandemic candidates. They split into haemorrhagic fevers like Crimean-Congo, Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, Rift Valley, Nipah and henipaviral diseases (that is, carried by bats).
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Others include Mers and Sars (which are themselves coronaviruses, sharing the same spiky structure) and the mosquito-borne Zika.
The primary danger, as David Quammen (author of Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic) puts it, is that these powerful pathogens mutate and start jumping from human to human, rather than animal to human. (The Wuhan outbreak has been sourced to an ill regulated food market.)
“There are seven billion of us humans now, and we are very, very interconnected. We fly around the world, we ship products worldwide, everything is being transferred around the world very quickly,” Quammen said to Vice magazine this week.
“So, if a new disease gets into us, it too will get transferred around the world very quickly. We’re like a forest of very dry trees and undergrowth, waiting to be hit by lightning.”
Instant and draconian quarantine seems to be one of the lessons learned in the past few decades. The Chinese authorities have already put travel restrictions around nine additional cities in Hubei province, which has a population of 58.5 million.
They’ve also shut down temples for the Lunar New Year, discouraging travel for hundreds of millions. And they’re giving themselves 10 days to build a new 1000-bed hospital in Wuhan itself.
I don’t hear many objections to top-down Chinese autocracy in this hazardous moment. But they’ve also learned from their own recent errors.
For the first crucial months of the Sars pandemic in the early 2000s, the Chinese authorities didn’t report the outbreaks and were reluctant to share information internationally. Many deaths were attributed to this sclerosis of the Chinese state.
Now, says a central office communique, “anyone who deliberately delays and hides the reporting of [virus] cases out of his or her own self-interest will be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity”.
We should note that the official title “pandemic” seems to cover a range of numbers. SARS globally infected 8098, but only killed 774, in 2002-2003. Ebola marked up 11,310 deaths in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, but only 15 fatalities worldwide. Whereas the “flu” pandemic of 1918, spreading among soldiers in camps, eventually killed 50m. Aids/HIV’s toll so far is 32m.
So what should we prioritise to stop the Chinese coronavirus from becoming the NBO? Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagion From Cholera To Ebola And Beyond, lays out some of the crucial steps.
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The first would be to actively monitor viral hotspots, and improve the conditions that generate them, rather than passively wait for indicators to arise (by which time it’s too late). For example, these viruses can spread in crowded slums. So replace them with decent housing and amenities (drainage, plumbing).
Wild birds are diverted from their natural paths by global warming and environmental disruption. From on high, they drop unfamiliar poo into not-too-robust factory farming, inviting wild mutations.
“We can do things like restore wild habitats so that the microbes that live inside animals stay inside animals,” suggests Shah, “instead of crossing over into our bodies and adapting to our bodies.”
Finally, any zones where people pass through in mad profusion (airports, checkpoints) can be places where microbes turn into pathogens.
AREAS with all of these conditions in a tight matrix should be “actively surveilled”, says Shah.
There are other measures by which we can be “pandemically prepared”, says the ex-tech mogul Bill Gates, now a major philanthropist for the developing world. For example, we can devote resources and research to new kinds of vaccine platforms. These are genetically designed to trigger your own body to make vaccines. In times of crisis, suggests Gates, these should be approved on a 90-day cycle rather than a 10-year turnaround.
Gates has a clear business head on when he notes that the annual cost of global pandemic preparedness is $3.4 billion a year – whereas the anticipated annual loss from a pandemic could be as much as $570bn. And again, Gates is astute in directing his philanthropic billions in this direction. Epidemiology can claim some great victories.
The World Health Organisation is one of those rare global institutions that can point to a planetary threat eliminated – the eradication of smallpox in 1980.
By comparison with nukes or climate crisis, where we grapple with something massive and structural, there is something literally hands-on about our response to this particular horseman of the apocalypse. Quarantine, treatment, vaccines, restriction of movement: these are medical and social techniques, tied up in care and protection.
My late mum was trained as a “barrier nurse”, which was an old specialism for dealing with infected patients. Tuberculosis was May Kane’s usual adversary in the 1950s (she revived her skills in the early, somewhat panicky days of Aids/HIV).
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Wikipedia calls barrier nursing an “archaic” term. There’s no doubt that these microbes and viruses are some of humanity’s oldest adversaries. Malaria has been
with us for 500,000 years. Shah estimates its overall death toll for humans at around the 50bn mark (yes, billion). With these kinds of numbers, and this permanent threat to the human condition, these bugs are like the tiniest and grimmest of reapers. They are death at our side, only a few mutations away from finding the cracks in our systems, whether bodily or societal.
IT’S comforting, in a way: these are familiar adversaries, rather than some imminent killer robots. The Gates Foundation is also super-anxious about bioterrorism, and the potential for rogue genomic labs to cook up new, unstoppable viral strains, either to destroy or to hold to ransom.
I’m hardly sanguine about biowar (after all, we’ve had foreign-state poisonings on British soil recently). But it strikes me that we’ve had a lot less of it than is, in fact, technically possible. Perhaps even the most dastardly among us recognises, at a species-being level, that the bugs among us should not be so easily tampered with. Natural mutations can be lethal enough. What uncontrollable horrors would we risk if we hacked away at them to improve their virulence?
A ruler of a mountain of corpses is king of very little indeed.
Maybe this is wisdom we could transfer elsewhere in our mondo apocalypso, as the hands creep closer to midnight.
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