The good news about Reston virus, derived both from the 1989 US scare and from retrospective research on Luzon, is that it doesn’t seem to cause illness in humans, only in monkeys. The bad news is tha...
For a dozen years it traveled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise. Death lagged some distance behind. No one knew. This virus was patient, unlike Ebola, unlike Marburg. More pat...
Acarologists (tick biologists)
Weighing only five grams (about the same as two dimes),
Problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines develop...
Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven’t collected a single snake. Maybe it’s the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in...
بعد أسبوع من موت آني ابنة داروين بينماالصورة لا تزال حاضرة في الذاكرة، كتب داروين مذكرة خاصة قصيرة تسجل القليل من مفاتنها، وعاداتها، وسماتها، ورقصاتها حوله بطول الممشى الرملي، وتدقيقها صعب الإرضاء، و...
Two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These
The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years pa...
The protein wrap is known as a capsid. The
Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial.
Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthrou...
Not just Machupo but also Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976, with Karl Johnson again prominently involved), HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), H...
Know that walking into a small woodlot, he wrote, is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.
The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.
Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of mur...
Britain’s Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo...
An amplifier host is a creature in which a virus or other pathogen replicates—and from which it spews—with extraordinary abundance. Some aspect of the host’s physiology, or its immune system, or its p...
A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.
Sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych