What I've Been Reading

Nevertheless, mosquitoes and water provide narrow paths from one host to the next. Mosquitoes, for example, are not syringes. They are fully functional animals that have their own immune systems, and even those microbes that can manage to evade mosquitoes' defenses will be limited to those in the blood. Similarly, water generally passes on those microbes that live in the digestive tract. Hunting and butchering, in contrast provide superhighways connecting a hunting species directly with the microbes in every tissue of the prey. 

I've never become completely accustomed to exactly what is required to prepare meat for consumption.  We take for granted what it means to remove hair and skin from a dead animal, the effort needed to separate meat from many bones distributed in an animal to support its movement. We forget how many parts of an animal must be negotiated to get the prime cuts: the lungs, the spleen, the cartilage. Watching the process on the dirt floor of a hut or on leaves spread out on the ground in a hunting camp, seeing the blood-covered hands that separate the various parts of the animal and hearing bits of discarded meat and bone hit the floor still shocks me. It also helps to remind me of the microbial significance of the event. 

The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age by Nathan Wolfe; who is aptly called the Indiana Jones of virus hunters. 

Max was little over three years, when I first listened to Nathan Wolfe interview - Waiting For The Next Plague on Edge. That was on January 30th 2009 (Yes, I was following Edge everyday that time). 

Fast forward to March 2020 - exactly 11 years and 2 months later, after the COVID pandemic hit, I went to my basement to dig through my "preparations" for a future pandemic. Surprisingly, I found masks, medical supplies etc., which I bought in 2009 after listening to Nathan's interview. 

For once, I was happy with myself that I acted on what learned and didn't just accumulated knowledge for the sake of knowing. Nothing matters in life than action. 

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

- Buddha 

In other words, I was expecting a pandemic for over a decade. 

• Viruses, the most diverse forms of life, remained completely opaque to humans until a meager one hundred years ago with Beijerinck's discovery. 
• Category Four agents represents the final steps on the journey to become a human-specific microbe. Whether or not monkeypox has the potential to join the pantheon of our Category Four agents remains to be seen. Microbes that reach Category Four can live exclusively in humans while simultaneously continuing to liv in animal reservoirs. Monkeypox still ranks as a Category Three agent, but that could certainly change. 
• Checkout how chytrid fungus has resulted in global grog deaths and in some cases extinction of entire grog species, a tragic loss of wildlife on our planet. What happened with the chyrid fungus also gives us important clues to a larger phenomenon that affects much more than amphibians. 
• The number of livestock on the planet now boggles the mind but the way that they're transformed into meat also differs in important ways from how it's been done since domestication began. Historically, a single animal would feed a family or at most a village. With the evident of processed meats, a single hot dog consumed at a baseball game can consist of multiple species (pig, turkey, cattle) and contain meat derived from hundred of animals. When you bite into that hot dog, you're literally biting into what was only a few decades ago an entire farm. Combining the meat of many animals and then distributing it to many people has obvious consequences. Connecting thousands of animals with thousands of consumers means that an average meat today will consume bit of millions of animals during their lifetime. What previously was a direct connection between one animal and one consumer is now a massively interconnected network of animal parts and those that eat them. And while cooking the meat certainly eliminates many of the risks, the massive number of interactions increases the potential that a rouge agent will make the jump. 
• Understand the term "emerging genes".
• Only a trivial fraction of the global ape population are under the watchful eye of woefully underfunded primatologists. If we're relying on these scientists to regularly capture the animal epidemics that could signal future human plagues, then we're destined to fail. To truly catch epidemics, we'll need to do more. 
• Please fund and support people who listen to "viral chatter".
• Steve Quake, a scientist working to change the ways we can forecast microbial evolution is not a microbiologist at all but rather a physics-trained bioengineer. 
• It is important to understand that all viruses are not our enemies. Safe viruses are some of the best friends we have in fighting the deadly ones. 
• Using one microbe to prevent another microbe from causing disease is pretty amazing. This is something that's increasingly explored in the nascent field of virotherapy. 
• Consider the human body. Only about one out every ten cells between your hat and shoes is human - the other nine belong to masses of bacteria that coat our skin, live in ur guts, and thrive in our mouths. The bacteria and viruses represented by thousands of species will outnumber the human genes every time. 
• There are gentle microbes out there - bugs that helps us, defend us, and live quietly within us doing no harm at all. If we could accurately determine which of those microbes on our bodies and in the environment were beneficial to us and which are rogue, we'd find something pleasantly surprising: the harmful ones are certainly in the minority. The goal of public health should not be to have a completely sterile world but to find the rogue elements and control them. A key part of addressing the nasty microbes will be to cultivate the microbes that help us. One day soon, the way we protect ourselves may be by propping up with bugs that live within us rather than knocking them down. 
• One day we may be able to rank the greatest future risks for pandemics, but for now we cannot. We know that they'll almost certainly be microbes that come from animals and that some spots around the world pose greater risks for their entry. 
• Among the most substantive risks for the emergence of a novel pandemics is the close contact between humans and animals, particularly wild mammals. Changing human behavior to decrease this sort of contact can begin long before we have an ideal prediction systems in place. 

The term "Risk Literacy" is an important one. The idea that part of the solution is having an informed public that can understand and appropriately interpret information on pandemics.  

Risk literacy, the ability to distinguish between different levels of severity, is not only for policy makers. Effective response to natural disasters depends on individual people and how well they stay calm and follow instructions. The constant barrage of threats articulated by the media has led to chronic risk habituation. The only way to break that logjam is for everyone to understand risk, to be able to assess the different kinds of disasters, and respond appropriately to them.  

Widespread risk literacy will help the public support the massive government expenditures that will be needed to appropriately predict and prevent pandemics. It will give a sense of how best to expend funds. 

From April 2001 to August 2002, a period which includes the 9/11 attacks, it's estimated that around eight thousand people died from terrorism. From April 2009 to August 2010, the same period of time but eight years later, over eighteen thousand people were confirmed dead from H1N1 pandemic alone - a pandemic dismissed by the public as insignificant. And that number is certainly an underestimate. 

I'm not claiming that proportionality in deaths is the only factor we should take into account when preparing for threats. But the trillions of dollars spent to prevent terrorism seem wildly disproportionate to actual risks when put the threats in proper context. 

 

The number one issue and the only issue which caused COVID and will cause future pandemics are our brutal relationship with animals; our fellow sentient creatures who we share this beautiful blue planet. 

Our mindless diet focusing only on tradition, gastrointestinal pleasures and sheer habit with no remorse for billions of animal sufferings nor our own health nor an understanding of that significant microbial event we leash every time we kill and chew meat. The truth is even after 18 months of COVID pandemic majority of the sapiens don't want to hear this nor don't want to change their diet. 

So, I am waiting and preparing for the next plague or worse, the final plague.