Everybody knows the big one is coming:
Military conventional wisdom, in addition to ACSH President (and former Army officer) Hank Campbell, likes to remind us, “Governments are always fighting the last war.”
Similar to military strategy and national security, our public health system tends to fixate on the “last war.”
The biomedical community has a rather myopic focus on just three of eight filoviruses: Ebola, Sudan, and Marburg. But, as the authors of a new paper in FEMS Microbiology Reviews argue, this could literally be a fatal mistake. Of the remaining five “neglected” filoviruses, three occasionally cause human disease and two are harmless to humans. However, there is no reason to assume that these five viruses will remain relatively docile. Viruses can and do mutate, after all. The Reston virus, a species of Ebola that does not cause illness in humans*, was featured in the real-life thriller The Hot Zone.
The big one could be a filovirus. But it could be just about anything viral, so long as no vaccine is immediately forthcoming.
What will really make it deadly is when resources snap back. When we cease food aid to Africa, then Africans, weak, malnourished, and desperate will flood into the jungles, and begin eating anything they find. Rotted bodies of animals which they would otherwise ignore will be eaten voraciously, and pathogens which humans would never encounter will meet immune systems barely able to function. Those pathogens will begin a slow burn and be slowly culled by the weak immune system for any mutations that can overcome the weakened immunity. That will be the start, and from there the diseases will begin to jump into healthy hosts. With the planet starved of resources, the world will be slow to respond, and the efforts to quell the outbreak will be ineffectual.
Then those pathogens will hop planes and hit massively overgrown populations of Western imbeciles who can’t even see the dangers of importing Islam. It is a statistical game, but given the scale of the economic problems we are facing, and how the overly r-nature of our populations will impede our escape from the economic depression to ensue, the only question practically, will be when in the Apocalypse the pandemic will hit.
On the bright side, given how pandemics seem to cull r-strategists, it could spare the West a lot of tough decisions.
I just hope it hits long enough after the start of the Apocalypse that our remaining population will have been inculcated with K, and programmed to hate r sufficiently to not make these mistakes again anytime soon.
[…] ASCH – The Pandemic May Arise From Filoviruses That We Ignore […]