Ten Millionth Of A Metre
in, and your body starts a battle. Countless microorganisms hitch a lift on
every stream of air being pulled into your lungs, seeking out a place where they
can embed themselves and multiply. Once inside every potential form of nutrition
is fair game: blood cells, fat cells, skin, bone marrow, lymphatic fluid – all
hosts for the army of invaders that just want to find a way of increasing their
numbers. You are alive because your body has evolved ways of fighting them off.
No medicine can match the efficiency of your own army of defenders across such a
vast range of attackers, without killing off its host as well.
the virus responsible for AIDS, is a beautiful thing to look at; rather like a
three dimensional cog with rounded buds spread across its spherical surface. In
cross-section the central Capsid, which contains the genetic material
responsible for allowing HIV to fight off all but the most sophisticated drugs,
is coffin-shaped. So beautiful, so appropriate, but so terrible that it is able
to cut through an entire country in just a few years, leaving a scarred,
distressed and dying landscape of human beings in its wake.
South Africa, nineteen percent of the population of 44 million are infected with
In Lesotho, twenty-three percent of the two million inhabitants have HIV. In
Botswana, twenty-four percent of the population of just under two million –
that’s nearly a quarter of every person in this tiny country; adults,
children, even new born babies – have a virus that will eventually kill most
Over a million of these tiny viral entities could fit, side by side, on this
full stop. We may have evolved defences against the oldest and most common
viruses, but human evolution is a slow process; we have no natural defences
1: HIV viruses and (inset) cross-section showing the central coffin-shaped
capsid (Source: © Boehringer-Ingelheim / Wikimedia Commons)
is another statistic. The World Health Organisation estimate that Dengue Fever,
caused by four types of closely related virus, is a risk for around two-fifths
of the world’s population[iii].
Without treatment, Dengue Fever is deadly in twenty percent of cases, and there
are around fifty million cases of the disease every year. Dengue Fever is spread
by mosquitoes, as is Yellow Fever, which kills 30,000 people a year. Japanese
Encephalitis is also spread by mosquitoes, but develops in pigs and birds before
being passed to humans by the same species of mosquito that infected these other
animals. This kills around 15,000 people a year and leaves another 25,000
Influenza is not spread by mosquitoes: it is spread by birds, humans and many
other mammals including domestic dogs and cats – in fact any warm-blooded
animal can potentially harbour and pass on influenza in its many forms. The
worry, quite rightly expressed by epidemiologists and other health professionals
about the potential for a catastrophic influenza pandemic (global infection), is
not based on some abstract idea that bears no resemblance to reality; it is a
genuine fear that echoes fiction in so many ways. Compare this quotation:
midnight the barriers were set up, and by dawn the next morning, the morning of
the twenty-fifth, several people had been shot at the barriers, most just
wounded, but three or four killed. Almost all of them were people coming north,
streaming out of Boston, stricken with fear, panic-stupid. They were dealt with.
that evening, most of the men manning the barricades were sick themselves,
glowing bright with fever, constantly propping their shotguns between their feet
so they could blow their noses. Some…simply fell down unconscious and were
later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town
hall, and there they died.[iv]
Boston Globe reported that in the twenty-four hours preceding 7:00 am of
September 23, 66 men, all of them probably in the peak years of physical
prowess, had died.
statistics boggled Welch’s mind: the sight of the lines of sick men shuffling
through the cold, penetrating rain to the hospital gave him no encouragement
about the immediate future. He needed no stethoscope to conclude that the
problem for many of them was lung failure. He could see that at a dozen paces:
some of them, stumbling along, the blankets over their shoulders soaking up the
fine drizzle, were turning blue and even purple.[v]
would take a brave person to tell which the fictional report is: it is actually
the first one, from Stephen King’s doomsday epic, The Stand. The second
quotation is from an American study of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which took
twenty-five million lives globally, or 1.5 percent of the world’s population.
The general public only seem to have recently grasped the deadly potential of
the seemingly innocuous flu virus. A healthy person can catch one of the more
benign and common strains of flu and spend a few days in bed albeit with
considerable discomfort, before making a full recovery.
up to a billion people worldwide may be infected every year[vi]
with influenza, of which half a million will die. Such is the population of the
Earth (6.6 billion and counting) that half a million people is a global
“hiccup” – a mere 0.008 percent of humanity; yet the Indian Ocean
tsunami, which took 300,000 lives in December 2004, is still remembered as a
world-changing event. Less than one percent of the annual global toll from
influenza died in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. Nineteen
hijackers in four aircraft making a coordinated attack on the military and
financial centres of the USA are tangible targets on which we can pile our
collective wrath. Unknowably vast numbers of sub-microscopic virii do not a
tangible target make.
Is A Virus?
irony that speaks volumes about the direction we are heading as a species, the
simplest description for a virus comes from the world of computers. Such is the
extent that we have substituted our ancient love of nature for the modern love
of technology, that we often have problems seeing the real world without a
technological analogy to help us along the way. So, for the uninitiated in
technology, a computer virus is a small, simple piece of computer code (a
program) that attaches itself to a larger piece of code in order to duplicate
itself and spread. At the time of writing, there were about 74,000 computer
viruses in the “wild”[vii]
(now there’s a bizarre use of the term “wild”, if ever there was one). For
the uninitiated in biology, a natural virus is an organism that has no means of
reproducing other than by using another organism as a host; generally that
organism is a cell within a larger organism, such as a person, plant or fungus.
Viruses reproduce by convincing a cell, by use of its protein coating, that it
is a desirable object to welcome into the cell’s interior. Once inside, the
virus loses its protective coating, revealing the genetic code, which is then
copied by the cell’s nucleus, just as though the cell is copying its own
genetic material. The cell then ejects the newly replicated viral material
through its walls and, voila! Replication is complete. This is clever stuff,
especially considering that a virus may not, in fact, be a living thing.
something that is less than a micron (a millionth of a metre) across couldn’t
be considered an animal even by the most imaginative biologist; but whether
something that is not even capable of reproducing on its own or with another
virus, let alone being able to move, excrete or grow, should be considered
“living” is another matter. Scientists cannot agree with each other on this,
largely because the definition of “life” is unclear: is it the ability to be
self aware – in which case things could get very complicated due to the
limited ways in which this can be tested (try holding a mirror in front of a
sightless creature to understand the problem); is it the ability to grow, move,
excrete, respire, reproduce and all those good things; or is it simply “the
ability to move a genetic blueprint into future generations, thereby
regenerating your likeness”?[viii]
We do know that there are probably more different viruses than all (other) types
of life, and that there are certainly more individual viruses than all (other)
individual life forms put together; so, if viruses are living then they are most
certainly the most successful life forms that there has ever been.
thought that my entire body is teeming with viruses that my own defence systems
are having to constantly fight off, and that if I find my immune system to be
compromised in any way – whether from lack of nutrients, or the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus – I could fall foul of them is not the kind of thing
that makes for a restful state of mind. Most people only knowingly come into
contact with a virus when they have a cold, or other minor infection, so have
little reason to be aware of their existence. Our ignorance of viruses, though
(and we are tremendously ignorant, despite the great strides that have been
taken in bringing immunization to the masses) is something that could be our
the poliovirus, the cause of Poliomyelitis. I have some home movies of my sister
and I happily playing on the beach at Margate, a middle-sized seaside resort in
England, during the hot summer of 1976. Dutifully we would stack up lumps of
chalk into makeshift dams in the shade of the Victorian sundeck and then fill
the resulting inundations with handfuls of the white foam that gathered in lines
at the water’s edge. The source of the foam was a short sewage outfall not
half a mile away, which also deposited partially treated human excrement a few
metres out to sea, only to be washed back inshore with the foam by the rising
the Thames Estuary, about 30 miles away, lies Southend on Sea. It was on the
coast of this town in the late 1940s that the legendary songwriter and performer
Ian Dury contracted polio, a life-threatening disease that is carried in faecal
matter, and can be caught merely by swallowing a small amount of infected water.
It was almost certainly from a poorly chlorinated swimming pool near the Spanish
town of Altea, that my own father contracted transverse myelitis, a related
viral disease of the nervous system, which led to him being partially paralysed
from the waist down. All the time I happily played in the sewage-ridden waters
of Margate no one thought to warn me that I should perhaps be careful.
this point you might be expecting me to say: “and it is here that I contracted
polio,” but I have nothing so emotive to add. I am fit, healthy and (so far)
free of disease, and that is thanks to my immune system working in the way it
should. Whether it will keep up with changes that happen in the future is
World Of Change
is heating, and change is happening faster than expected. The signs are there
for everyone to see: a polar ice cap that opens up enough to allow ice-free
navigation for the first time since humans colonised North America; the
accelerated calving of icebergs in the Southern Ocean; the early emergence of
bulbs and other spring plants in temperate zones; even the wine trade is feeling
the change as southern Europe dries up and northern Europe warms. It doesn’t
take a big change in global temperature to make a difference – as of the end
of 2007, the average global temperature had risen 0.7°C above the mean for the
previous two hundred years – because this is a planet of carefully balanced
systems. Thresholds that are a hair’s breadth from being breached are ready to
tip like card houses in a breeze.
British Antarctic Survey, about as sanguine and level-headed a body as you could
find reported this in 2006: “Adélie penguins, a species well adapted to sea
ice conditions, have declined in numbers and been replaced by open-water species
such as chinstrap penguins. Melting of perennial snow and ice covers has
resulted in increased colonisation by plants. A long-term decline in the
abundance of Antarctic krill in the SW Atlantic sector of the southern ocean may
be associated with reduced sea ice cover.”[ix]
Three separate findings, and a whole web of changes that spawn from them: webs
that you will find everywhere, and many of which I will show you throughout this
and visit Suffolk, England, on a warm day in September 2007:
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said last night that
tests had confirmed bluetongue in a second cow at the Baylham House Rare Breeds
Farm, near Ipswich, Suffolk. It was immediately slaughtered to limit the chances
of the disease spreading. Bluetongue has already spread across the Continent to
Britain. On Sunday, Debbie, a ruddy-haired Highland cow who was a favourite with
visitors, was put down after being found to be suffering from the midge-borne
tests continue to see if more animals have been infected, Defra announced that
from 3.30pm today a huge bluetongue surveillance area restricting the movement
of animals will be established over a 150km radius around the Suffolk farm where
the disease was first found. This is the maximum distance that midges can fly,
but if they have spread from Suffolk, biting animals as they go, the infection
could be much more widespread. It has spread like wildfire across farms in
Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, having originated in Africa.
Thousands of animals have died or been destroyed, causing massive losses for
is an arbovirus, short for “arthropod-borne virus”. Arthropods include
spiders, centipedes, shrimps and crabs; but, most importantly, they include
insects, the most diverse group of animals on Earth. Anything that assists the
spread of a disease is known as a “vector”, which essentially means the
movement of something in a specific direction. Mosquitoes are notorious vectors
for diseases, and not just those caused by viruses. Midges, which are closely
related to mosquitoes, range from the harmless (to humans), non-biting Cecidomyiidae,
to the painfully persistent Highland midge, which has been suggested as the
reason for much of Scotland being undeveloped.
midges that are responsible for the spread of the bluetongue virus are
temperature sensitive: based on the global “temperature gradient” a tenth of
a degree increase pushes breeding grounds north by at least ten kilometres. If
there are anomalies in temperature caused by local warming, insects can be
pushed far further. Temperature gradients also operate with height above sea
level, with every ten metres in height causing a drop in temperature of 0.1°C.
That means that with 0.7°C of additional heating midges, or any other
temperature-sensitive organism, can range over land that is up to seventy metres
higher than previously. That makes a lot of difference in hilly areas.
for humans, midges can be easily killed off by frost, but as frosts have been
starting later and later in the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the midges have
been able to extend their breeding cycles into stormier times of the year. This
effectively means that they can be blown across seas and into previously
unaffected areas. If that wasn’t bad enough, warmer temperatures also cause
study carried out in 1999, found that mosquito larvae were extremely sensitive
to temperature in determining how quickly they developed into adult mosquitoes[xi].
At 15°C the average development time for two types of mosquito were 44 and 61
days respectively. When the temperature was increased to 22°C this development
time was reduced to 32 days for the first type and 24 days for the second type.
At thirty degrees, the second type of mosquito was able to go from larvae to
adult in a mere 14 days. The significance of this is mind-boggling when you
consider how quickly mosquitoes can breed. If a seven degree increase in
temperature is able to reduce the breeding cycle of a mosquito by thirty-seven
days, then that means a mere one degree increase in temperature could allow for
one additional breeding cycle during the breeding season. Given that a female
mosquito can lay hundreds of eggs in its short lifetime, one extra breeding
cycle is a frightening prospect: one more generation of mosquitoes can mean a
thousand-fold increase in numbers. A thousand fold increase in West Nile Virus,
Yellow Fever, Dengue Fever, and Japanese Encephalitis. Am I scaremongering?
Rommelaere, 82, survived the D-Day invasion in Normandy, but not a mosquito
bite. Six decades after the war, the hardy Saskatchewan farmer was bitten by a
bug carrying a disease that has spread from the equator to Canada as
temperatures have risen. Within weeks, he died from West Nile virus.
Epstein, a physician who worked in Africa and is now on the faculty of Harvard
Medical School, said that, if anything, scientists weren't worried enough about
we projected to occur in 2080 are happening in 2006. What we didn't get is how
fast and how big it is, and the degree to which the biological systems would
respond," Epstein said in an interview in Boston. "Our mistake was in
really don’t think so.
2: Liverpool Street Station, London (Source:
For fourteen years I travelled into London by train, for the most part alighting
at Liverpool Street Station in the heart of the Square Mile, the financial
centre of the UK. It took me a while to get accustomed to the constant
threading, dodging and occasional colliding of thousands of people heading to
and from work within the concourse and on the noisy, hectic streets outside. The
density of travellers is modest, though, compared to the tumult of people
thronging the platforms, concourses and pavements of Southern and South East
Asia. In India, suburban trains still dominate, transporting over 3 billion
people a year across the cities of the nation[xiii],
while the cross-country and cross-state lines are rightly known as the arteries
of the nation. But there is a price to pay in terms of comfort, “intimate”
would be a good word to describe a rush-hour journey. This
pen picture written by a Mumbaian describes the experience wonderfully:
train arrives on platform, one starts by praying to one's favourite God. The
arrival of the train is marked by a sudden change in the atmosphere at the
station. Everyone, including the seemingly docile auntie pulls up her (ahem)
socks, clenches her fists and gets ready for THE GREAT CHARGE. This sight can
easily make initial non-supporters of evolution great believers of Darwin’s
Theory, for what follows is nothing but living proof of Darwin's idea of
'Survival of the Fittest'.
reason I believe that the rails offer too much for the measly sum we pay for the
tickets is that they provide free exercise, body massage and stretching aerobics
early in the morning (as well as all day through) which is definitely an
advantage for today's health-obsessed generation.[xiv]
battery conditions of human transportation throughout the world – whether on
foot in London, bicycle in Beijing, underground railway in Tokyo, car in Los
Angeles or train in Mumbai – are symptoms of an overcrowded planet full of
time-dependent, job-dependent, money-dependent people. Intimacy is rarely of our
choosing: the lives we are increasingly shoehorned into by economic necessity
(in other words, “work or die”) are often led in squalid conditions. It is a
blessing that the notorious walled city of Kowloon, with a population density
approaching two million people per square kilometre, is no longer with us, but
similar, much larger urban areas exist, and are growing. One part of Mumbai in
India squeezes 200,000 people into just 1.7 square kilometres[xv];
an area half the size of New York’s Central Park. Kowloon still accommodates
over two million people at a density of 118,000 people per square kilometre: six
times as cramped as central London.
conditions are not restricted to humans. As we treat people, we also treat
animals. Karl Taro Greenfeld described the method of storing wild animals for
food in Guangzhou, China as “industrialized”:
cage in Xin Yuan, I counted fifty-two cats pushed in so tightly that their
intestines were spilling out from between the wire bars. There were fifty-five
such cages in this one stall. There were fifty-two stalls down this one row of
vendors. And there were six rows in this one market. There were seven markets on
million animals in a single street is an astonishing estimate, but not when you
consider the scale of battery farming in China. According to the US Department
in 2004 there were 85 poultry farms in China each with over a million birds
being bred for meat, and a total of four billion birds slaughtered in that one
year. The battle against “bird flu” or the H5N1 virus is being waged in the
back yard farms of Eastern Europe and South East Asia, with mandatory housing,
and sometimes slaughter taking place at the first sign of a diseased bird. Yet
these free-range conditions are merely the stopping off points for wild birds
that have already contracted the virus. The source of the virus and the cause of
the most lethal strains of influenza are bound up in the way that viruses
operate on large, densely packed populations of animals.
process by which organisms evolve starts with the mutation of a piece of its
genetic material. Mutations cannot be predicted, but can be encouraged to happen
more or less frequently; for instance, certain types of radiation are able to
change the chemical makeup of an organism’s DNA, so can be said to accelerate
the mutation process. By their nature, mutations only involve a single gene at a
time; multiple genetic changes require multiple mutations. In most cases genetic
mutations have little or no effect on the organism; in other cases the mutation
may be damaging to the organism, for instance it may lead to excess cell
division, which can lead to cancer, or it may impede the organism’s ability to
reproduce. In some cases, though, the mutation is a positive step for the
organism, and it is this type of mutation that is generally considered to be
“evolutionary”. In order for a virus to pass to a species other than the one
it is currently hosted by it may have to undergo a number of mutations, none of
which can be damaging to the virus itself. Eventually the virus may have changed
sufficiently to make the hop to another species.
through mutation is a slow and haphazard process and, in normal population
densities, more often than not the virus will end up as a benign scrap of DNA,
unable to do its genetic duty. In vast populations of birds that are pecking,
flapping and depositing faecal matter upon each other, a veritable viral
bean-feast can take place. Viruses are rapidly passing from bird to bird, and
back again, mutating and evolving as they go. A single incidence of highly
pathogenic (deadly) bird flu can wipe out an entire shed of birds within 48
hours, according to the World Health Organisation. WHO goes on to say: “Apart
from being highly contagious among poultry, avian influenza viruses are readily
transmitted from farm to farm by the movement of live birds, people (especially
when shoes and other clothing are contaminated), and contaminated vehicles,
equipment, feed, and cages. Highly pathogenic viruses can survive for long
periods in the environment, especially when temperatures are low. For example,
the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus can survive in bird faeces for at least 35 days
at low temperature (4°C).”[xviii]
The long survival time at low temperatures helps explain why influenza outbreaks
occur more frequently during temperate winters in the Northern Hemisphere (the
other reason, particularly for rapid spread, is that people stay indoors and
crowd together more when it is cold). For once, global warming is not to blame.
The same cannot be said for human behaviour.
book “China Syndrome” by Karl Taro Greenfeld contains a superb analysis of
the social and biological conditions that led to the global outbreak of SARS in
2003, and then the inevitable spread of H5N1 from 2006 onwards. He writes:
“For a microbe, a city is a target-rich environment, with slabs of human meat
stacked literally one over another in apartments and houses, waiting to be
consumed. Of the four major modes of disease transmission – waterborne, vector
borne, airborne or direct contact – each is facilitated by urban life.”[xix]
We create perfect environments for viruses to spread and thrive, right down to
the artificially moist and putrid environments without which such agents would
die in minutes.
you bring the kind of rich pathogenic soup that can be found in cities in close
proximity to the kinds of bird farming described above then the likelihood of
cross-species transmission is greatly increased. If a human influenza virus
evolves sufficiently to infect a bird, and that bird is infected with H5N1 bird
flu then the two viruses can mix and “swap” genes[xx].
The resulting virus will then have enough common characteristics to both infect
humans and create the kind of turmoil that H5N1 has caused in flocks of
birds. It only takes one person in the vast genetic pool of our major cities to
contract a transgenic virus for it to then become a human epidemic.
only takes one flight across the world for an epidemic to turn into a pandemic.
Humans like to fly; it has become one of the key aspirations of the consumer
society to take long trips to different parts of the world and experience the
way that other nations display their heritage, build their houses, pollute their
waterways and position their Coca Cola machines. We travel to distant lands to
lie on distant beaches in order to come home and tell our distant friends what
the distant beaches were like. Tourism is not just big business, it is the
primary business of many countries; and God help anyone who tries to stop
flights from continuing to feed their economic boom! Air travel is excluded from
all international, and the vast majority of national targets to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, it is expected to account for 15 percent of all
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, up from just 3 percent in 2006[xxi].
It is illegal for an individual country to tax aircraft fuel and aircraft
study published in the scientific journal Nature in 2006 found a remarkable drop
in the numbers of early-onset influenza cases amongst humans in the period
following the World Trade Center attacks in September 2001. “The 27 percent
drop in passenger numbers on international flights delayed the normal peak of
flu deaths by nearly two weeks, from February to March. And the fall in domestic
air travel meant that the disease took 16 days longer to spread throughout the
Incredibly, and almost certainly due to economic pressure from business and
business-friendly governments, restricting air travel does not form part of
international plans for preventing the spread of any potential strains of highly
scientists watch the skies for migrating birds that may harbour avian flu, the
same skies are filled with people who may be carrying something equally lethal.
By A Thousand Cuts
The H5 strains of avian
influenza are often called the “Ebola of the bird world”. The Ebola of the
human world, and also that of a number of other primates, is something that
almost defies description, such is its brutality:
brought a bag of whole blood. Dr Musoke hooked a bag on a stand and inserted the
needle into the patient’s arm. There was something wrong with the patient’s
veins; his blood poured out around the needle. At every place in the patient’s
arm where he stuck the needle, the vein broke apart like cooked macaroni and
spilled blood, and the blood ran from the punctures down the patient’s arm and
wouldn’t coagulate. The patient continued to bleed from the bowels, and these
haemorrhages were now as black as pitch.[xxiv]
is a type of haemorrhagic fever, the type that leads to the liquefaction of the
internal organs while the sufferer “bleeds out”, infecting almost everyone
who comes into contact with the copious quantities of blood that the sufferer
emits. There are other forms of haemorrhagic fever with the most common types,
Dengue and Lassa, being far less deadly than the much rarer Marburg, Rift Valley
and Ebola. The reason that Ebola has not caused more deaths overall (about 1200
deaths since it was first discovered[xxv])
is because of the speed with which it kills the victim – as little as 4 days
from first exposure. HIV, on the other hand, can lie dormant for years, being
passed from person to person without any symptoms showing.
while HIV can only be passed from human to human in its current configuration,
Ebola can seemingly pop out of nowhere, cause a spate of deaths, and then
disappear with epidemiologists none the wiser as to precisely where the original
infection came from. Rift Valley Fever is harboured in cattle, goats, sheep and
other hoofed animals; Lassa resides in a species of West African rodent;
Ebola’s primary source is officially “unknown”.
Wiselka, a consultant in infectious diseases at the Nuffield Hospital in
Leicester has little doubt over the reasons for Ebola’s emergence. He says:
“Exploiting wild habitats such as the tropical rain forests allow interaction
between human hosts, animals and vectors of infection, such as rats and insects.
This can increase the likelihood of certain infections such as yellow fever,
hantavirus and Ebola, which are normally carried by animal hosts.”[xxvi]
River sweeps round in a continuous arc from the northern heights of Zambia in
the heart of Africa, through the ignominiously named Democratic Republic of
Congo (formerly Zaire) until finally, after 4,700 km, emptying into the Atlantic
Ocean at the small town of Muanda in the Republic of the Congo. Covering the
bulk of its catchment area, swelling its volume with incessant rainfall, is the
second largest continuous area of forest in the world: the Central African
Rainforest. This great block of green canopy contains some of the richest plant
and animal habitat in existence. This area of forest also contains, potentially,
around 37 billion tonnes of carbon, more than the whole of Southeast Asia and
the USA combined[xxvii];
that is over five times as much carbon as all human activity on Earth produces
extent of this vital carbon “sink”[xxviii]
is shrinking each year. In 1990 the Central African Rainforest occupied 2.5
million square kilometres; in 2005 it occupied less than 2.4 million km², a
reduction of about five percent in total area[xxix].
Five percent may not seem like a lot, but when you look at the speed the forest
is degrading at the same time then you realise something fundamental is
happening. According to a report published in 2007[xxx],
over a quarter of this unique habitat had been earmarked for logging, while only
twelve percent was officially protected – in practice not protected at all.
From a disease point of view, the expansion of logging tracks and other roads is
equally disturbing: “[the study] found that road density had increased
dramatically since the 1970s and that around 29 percent of the remaining Congo
rainforest was ‘likely to have increased wildlife hunting pressure because of
easier access and local market opportunities’ offered by new logging towns and
Access to forest means access to disease vectors, and in this part of the world
that means a potential outbreak of Ebola is never far away.
way that humans are exploiting the rainforests of Central Africa, for tropical
timber, for minerals like coltan – a key component in micro-electronics –
and gold, and increasingly for “bush meat”, beggars belief. Yet, it seems as
though any price is worth paying for economic wealth: climate change, degraded
habitats, silt-laden rivers, even a disease that could strike at any time, kill
off an entire town in days, and then disappear again. And there lies a vital
message: if we don’t exercise discretion in the way we treat the planet, its
animals and its plants, then we may fall foul of the smallest, yet one of the
most effective killers that there has ever been: the not so humble virus.
[i] UNAIDS, “2006 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic”, 2006, http://data.unaids.org/pub/GlobalReport/2006/2006_GR_CH02_en.pdf (accessed 28 November, 2007)
[ii] Not everyone infected with HIV will develop full-blown AIDS; the main reason being that many will die of other causes before the incubation period has passed. If the recipient of the infection does survive the incubation period (up to 10 years, but far less without drug therapy) then it is almost certain that they will contract AIDS.
[iii] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs117/en/ (accessed 28 November 2007)
[iv] Stephen King, “The Stand”, 1978, New English Library.
[v] Alfred W. Crosby, “America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918”, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
[vi] http://www.who.int/vaccine_research/diseases/ari/en/index.html (accessed 28 November, 2007)
[vii] Information from Symantec Corp. http://www.symantec.com/norton/security_response/definitions.jsp (accessed 28 November, 2007). An “in the wild” virus is one that has been detected on a computer other than the one on which it was developed, i.e. it has multiplied.
[viii] George Rice, “Are Viruses Alive?”, http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/yellowstone/viruslive.html (accessed 28 November, 2007)
[ix] British Antarctic Survey, “Climate Change – Our View”, http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/bas_research/our_views/climate_change.php (accessed 30 November, 2007)
[x] The Independent, “Second case of bluetongue found in Suffolk”, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2996099.ece (accessed 30 November, 2007)
[xi] Jirí Olejnícek and Ivan Gelbic, “Differences in response to temperature and density between
two strains of the mosquito, Culex pipiens molestus Forskal”, J. Vector Ecology (25), 2000.
[xii] Washington Post, “Climate Change Drives Disease To New Territory”, 2006.
[xiii] Indian Railways Yearbook 2005-6, http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/deptts/stat-eco/YB-05-06/passenger-business.pdf (accessed 4 December, 2007)
[xiv] “The Great Mumbai Rail Experience”, http://cosmic-confusion.blogspot.com/2006/08/great-mumbai-rail-experience.html (accessed 3 January, 2008)
[xvi] Karl Taro Greenfeld, “China Syndrome”, 2006, Penguin Books.
[xvii] USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, “China, Peoples Republic of Poultry and Products Semi-Annual Report 2006”, 2006, http://www.fas.usda.gov/gainfiles/200602/146176724.pdf (accessed 4 December, 2007)
[xviii] World Health Organization, “Avian influenza – Fact Sheet”, 2006, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/avian_influenza/en/ (accessed 6 December, 2007)
[xix] Greenfeld, ibid.
[xx] Ontario Genomics Institute, “Is it possible that avian flu can combine with Spanish Flu?”, http://www.ontariogenomics.ca/education/episode13.asp (accessed 6 December, 2007)
[xxi] New Scientist, “European airlines to trade emissions allowances”, http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/aviation/dn10829-european-airlines-to-trade-emissions-allowances.html (accessed 6 December, 2007)
[xxii] As described in the (former) Chicago Convention, 1944: “Fuel, lubricating oils, spare parts, regular equipment and aircraft stores on board an aircraft of a contracting State, on arrival in the territory of another contracting State and retained on board on leaving the territory of that State shall be exempt from customs duty, inspection fees or similar national or local duties and charges.” International Civil Aviation Organization, “Convention on International Civil Aviation: Ninth Edition, 2006”, http://www.icao.int/icaonet/dcs/7300_cons.pdf (accessed 13 June, 2008).
[xxiii] Nature, “Planes play big role in spreading flu”, http://network.nature.com/boston/news/articles/2006/09/12/planes-play-big-role-in-spreading-flu (accessed 6 December, 2007).
[xxiv] Richard Preston, “The Hot Zone”, Doubleday, 1994.
[xxv] World Health Organization, “Ebola haemorrhagic fever”, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/ (accessed 6 December, 2007)
[xxvi] Martin Wiselka, personal communication, 7 November 2007.
[xxviii] A carbon sink is anything that locks away carbon rather than it being released into the atmosphere.
[xxix] UN FAO, ibid.
[xxx] Nadine T. Laporte, Jared A. Stabach, Robert Grosch, Tiffany S. Lin, Scott J. Goetz, “Expansion of Industrial Logging in Central Africa”, Science (8), 2007, (quoted in http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0607-congo.html (accessed 6 December, 2007))
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