Six Modern Plagues
Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them by Mark Jerome Walters
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I just finished this popular science/medicine work by journalist and veterinarian Mark Jerome Walters for the first day of a fall seminar on Ecology and Health and even with my wariness of popular science books, I really enjoyed this one and thought it's only failing was that it was too general and simplistic.
Taking six "new" diseases (Mad Cow, AIDS, Salmonella DT104, Lyme Disease, Hantavirus, and West Nile) Walters demonstrates how all have ecological roots. Forgive me if I geek out here, but I love this stuff. See, humans are "K" strategists and bacteria and viruses are "r" strategists. These are reproductive strategies in response to environmental conditions. Humans have few offspring and nurture them more because they are a more stable environment, while bacteria and viruses produce many offspring and do not nurture them because they live in hostile environments. The problem is that human beings are altering the environment in ways that are making "r" strategists proliferate at cost to human health.
Not just global warming, but patterns of suburban development, the farming industry, and the deforestation of central Africa, all have medical as well as ecological effects. For example, Lyme Disease probably existed in the United States for a long time, but it required certain conditions for it to reach epidemic levels. Some of these factors were: suburban development counteracted controlling deer herd sizes through hunting, the presence of stone walls, wood piles and other "ecotonal edges" where humans and nature interact, warmer and moister climate, and a large acorn crop. In the case of Mad Cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy), the farming industry's desire for profits led them to make a cannibal out of a previously grazing animal (the author also links BSE with Chronic Wasting Disease - which terrified me, since I grew up eating venison). With Salmonella DT104, the dairy industry's strategy of replacing a mother's milk with high doses of antibiotics helped created antibiotic resistant strains of Salmonella.
Walters explanations and language are very readable with very few of those annoying journalistic tendencies (like "the scientist had a Ethan Hawke like goatee" which will forever mar Field Notes from a Catastrophe for me). His solution is "simple" and revealed in the chapter on Hantavirus through the description of Navajo responses to previous outbreaks. We need to stop seeing emerging and reemerging diseases through the tired old trope of "battle" but realize that "r" strategists want to live just as much as we do and are as opportunistic as we are. Realizing our relationship to them and using past examples (interconnectedness as Walters likes to say) is a start toward realizing the diverse impact of our actions. We live IN the environment in which we alter.
***
I just finished this popular science/medicine work by journalist and veterinarian Mark Jerome Walters for the first day of a fall seminar on Ecology and Health and even with my wariness of popular science books, I really enjoyed this one and thought it's only failing was that it was too general and simplistic.
Taking six "new" diseases (Mad Cow, AIDS, Salmonella DT104, Lyme Disease, Hantavirus, and West Nile) Walters demonstrates how all have ecological roots. Forgive me if I geek out here, but I love this stuff. See, humans are "K" strategists and bacteria and viruses are "r" strategists. These are reproductive strategies in response to environmental conditions. Humans have few offspring and nurture them more because they are a more stable environment, while bacteria and viruses produce many offspring and do not nurture them because they live in hostile environments. The problem is that human beings are altering the environment in ways that are making "r" strategists proliferate at cost to human health.
Not just global warming, but patterns of suburban development, the farming industry, and the deforestation of central Africa, all have medical as well as ecological effects. For example, Lyme Disease probably existed in the United States for a long time, but it required certain conditions for it to reach epidemic levels. Some of these factors were: suburban development counteracted controlling deer herd sizes through hunting, the presence of stone walls, wood piles and other "ecotonal edges" where humans and nature interact, warmer and moister climate, and a large acorn crop. In the case of Mad Cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy), the farming industry's desire for profits led them to make a cannibal out of a previously grazing animal (the author also links BSE with Chronic Wasting Disease - which terrified me, since I grew up eating venison). With Salmonella DT104, the dairy industry's strategy of replacing a mother's milk with high doses of antibiotics helped created antibiotic resistant strains of Salmonella.
Walters explanations and language are very readable with very few of those annoying journalistic tendencies (like "the scientist had a Ethan Hawke like goatee" which will forever mar Field Notes from a Catastrophe for me). His solution is "simple" and revealed in the chapter on Hantavirus through the description of Navajo responses to previous outbreaks. We need to stop seeing emerging and reemerging diseases through the tired old trope of "battle" but realize that "r" strategists want to live just as much as we do and are as opportunistic as we are. Realizing our relationship to them and using past examples (interconnectedness as Walters likes to say) is a start toward realizing the diverse impact of our actions. We live IN the environment in which we alter.