111. Rats, Guns and History

I just finished reading Hans Zinsser’s 1935 classic, Rats, Lice and History. In it the Harvard biologist writes the “biography” of Typhus Fever, with side chapters on the Plague, Smallpox, Syphilis, sanitation, and the role of infectious diseases in the history of humankind. His reading of medical research and history is prodigious—an interesting side-note is that the medical profession has continually shared information across political and military lines through wars and revolutions. A continuing message is that the impacts of diseases—and the rats, lice, mosquitos, teste flies, and all that carry them—have been greater than those of the generals. 

 

Wars and revolutions have had symbiotic relationships with the major infectious diseases—crowded armies in cold, wet, hot, dry, dirty conditions have been good breeding grounds, and armies and individual warriors great transmitters of plague and typhus and influenza. (In our Civil War, two-thirds of the estimated 620,000 deaths were due to disease.) In other books I’ve followed the influenza of 1918 from a Kansas military base to the East Coast on a troop train, across the sea on a troop ship, into battle, across enemy lines and then across the world. It came back again with the troops to the US, where it killed more than the War—and as many or more than had died in the Civil War: over 600,000 Americans.

 

Zinsser talks about the endemic stages of major diseases—the lie low periods when there are enough rats, lice, and proximate humans to keep a disease alive on a shoestring, infecting just enough human carriers to keep it vital and ready for the next opportunity to explode into pandemic. 

 

Our Covid has ripe conditions in many places—hunger, famine, and filth are friends to infectious diseases, and the military upheavals in Yemen, Myanmar, and Israel are making conditions even more inviting to the germs and viruses of the day. Add in crowded conditions that exist in India and in major cities everywhere, and the drought that is forcing people in the Middle East, Africa, and Central America northward in swarms—and one can only speculate on when and where the next covid outbreak will be. 

 

Vaccinate, yes. But it’s a mobile world, and our safe nation cannot exist as an island; we’d best get going on vaccinating the rest of the world. It’s worked with Smallpox and Polio.

 

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