5 Facts from Sonia Shah’s Pandemic That You Need to Know Now

‘When the pandemic finally arrived, no one could quite believe it,’ is how the new preface to science journalist Sonia Shah’s 2016 book Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond opens. For Shah, the most striking aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic is how it was eerily familiar.

Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Shah’s book is a startling examination of the pandemics that have ravaged humanity and a look at how history prepares us to confront the most serious acute global health emergency of our time.

Here are our five key takeaways from her book that you can use to better understand this current health crisis:

#1. More than 60 per cent of our newly emerged pathogens originate in the furred and winged creatures around us.

In a natural setting, horse shoe bats, which live in caves, never rub shoulders with palm civets, a kind of cat that lives in trees. Neither would normally come within spitting distance of people, either. But all three came together in the [Guangzhou, China] wet market. The fact that the virus had spread from bats into civet cats had been especially critical to SARS’s emergence. The civet cats were, for some reason, especially vulnerable to the virus. This gave the virus the opportunity to amplify its numbers, like a whistle in a tunnel. With increased replication came increased opportunities to mutate and evolve, to the extent that it evolved from a microbe that inhabited horse shoe bats to one that could infect humans. Without that amplification, it’s hard to say whether the SARS virus would have ever emerged.

More than 60 percent of our newly emerged pathogens originate in the furred and winged creatures around us. Some of these new pathogens come from domesticated animals, such as pets and livestock. Most— over 70 percent— come from wild animals.

#2. Pathogens, even if ubiquitous, can cause pandemics only if they encounter the right transmission opportunities wherever they land. A widely distributed pathogen, deprived of such opportunities, is as harmless as a defanged snake.

Many people worry about catching bugs during air travel, but in fact only a subset of pathogens easily spreads during flights themselves. Pathogens that spread via direct contact, like HIV and Ebola, are unlikely to amplify during flights. Pathogens that spread between people through vectors, like the mosquito-borne West Nile virus and dengue, can only occasionally survive air travel, too— the cool, arid atmosphere of modern airplanes is often deadly for their mosquito carriers. Respiratory pathogens like SARS, however, are ideally suited. By spreading through droplets released while coughing or sneezing or through aerosols, extra- tiny droplets that can hang suspended in the air, they can turn a single infected carrier upon departure into a planeload of carriers upon arrival.

#3. It may seem as if the virus disappeared. But it hasn’t.

According to taxonomists, SARS-Cov2 (Covid-19) hails not only from the same family of viruses as its fellow pandemic-causing pathogen SARS-Cov1 but also from the same species. The first SARS pandemic erupted in 2003. The lopsided balance it struck between contagiousness and deadliness caused it to burn out after killing close to eight hundred of the some eight thousand people it infected. The virus-producing factory that led to the first SARS outbreak was never shut down, however. It was only a matter of time before another virus with a potentially more durable combination of attributes would emerge. Indeed, its younger sibling, just a little more contagious and a little less deadly, would best its ancestor by several orders of magnitude

#4. Quarantine is an ancient practice and it works

Co-operative strategies are especially important to defend ourselves against new pathogens because they don’t necessarily require high-tech interventions or sophisticated understanding of the pathogen itself to be effective. Even societies with the most rudimentary sense of how pathogens spread can implement effective containment strategies by capitalizing on their ability to work cooperatively.

The Acholi people of Uganda are one of the few ethnic groups in Africa whose traditional beliefs about infectious diseases have been studied by medical anthropologists. Many believe that diseases spread through sorcery and spirits. Their traditional responses to epidemics nevertheless limit pathogens’ spread: at the first sign of contagion, they work together to isolate the sick, mark their homes with long poles of elephant grass, warn outsiders not to enter affected villages, and refrain from a number of potentially disease-transmitting behaviors, including socializing, sexual intercourse, eating certain foods, and traditional burial practices.

#5. We can’t rely on modern medicine to save us from the threat posed by new pathogens.

For one thing, even when scientists devise new cures, we are not necessarily able to produce them at the right scale and at the right time. Drug development is slow and constrained by the economic concerns of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry. If the market for a new drug is modest, it doesn’t matter how big the public-health need for it is, or how solid the scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness: that drug is unlikely to get to market. There are precious few drugs developed for diseases, like malaria and Ebola, that selectively afflict the poor. Malaria sickens hundreds of millions of people every year, but since most of those victims have less than $1 a year to spend on health care, the market for new malaria drugs is vanishingly small. Ebola affects far fewer people than malaria but poses a much more alarming public-health threat. As of 2014, there were no drugs or vaccines available for Ebola, either.

For more facts on the on-going Pandemic, order your copy of Sonia Shah’s Pandemic today!