Mystery of the Misery: Expert Muses About Infections

I’m fascinated by all the widely accepted facts that we are now told ain’t so. For example, the Black Death was bubonic plague, right? Big rats and tiny fleas running around loaded with Yersinia pestis. Now we’re told by Scott and Duncan [Return of the Black Death] that the Black Death fits better with the picture of a viral hemorrhagic fever. Like Ebola. And, no, I don’t get my medical training from Hollywood, but the film Outbreak made a fascinating case about what might happen if Ebola mutated and suddenly started to spread by the airborne route. Not so far-fetched given how gene splicing could easily splice the appropriate Ebola genes onto some influenza or smallpox virus. Are there any mad scientists out there who would do such a thing and give us our 21st century Black Death? (Note that although no indictments have ever been made, there is good evidence that the post-9/11 anthrax came from an American lab.)

Wildfires, floods, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis ... all seem to come with a higher cost in human misery and death nowadays than in former times. But is the higher cost only secondary to a higher count -- of us humans? The world population was 2 billion when I was born and is now 6.5 billion. So if humans are getting in the way of fires and floods, etc., does that mean that we are equally potentially getting in the way of nasty bugs? Would the 1918 flu pandemic have gotten off the ground in the absence of crowded military camps containing thousands of potential hosts waiting for the virus to arrive? Probably not.