Habitat doesn’t replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, f...
Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising aga...
How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressur...
Identifying the new virus was only step one in solving the immediate mystery of Hendra, let alone understanding the disease in a wider context. Step two would involve tracking that virus to its hiding...
If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city—more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions—it might have escaped containment and burned through a
Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.
To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and cir...
Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications. There’s a nice word: ramifications. It’s...
When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis.
When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like...
Equatorial Africa? Could it have arrived there in one soaring leap, leaving no traces in between? From southwestern Sudan to Manila is almost seven thousand miles as the bat flies. But no bat can fly...
Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of dome...
Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befud...
Increases of the infectivity rate may lead to large epidemics. This quiet warning has echoed loudly ever since. It’s a cardinal truth, over which public health officials obsess each year during influe...
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