We always want to believe that history happened only to 'them,' 'in the past,' and that somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it. Many aspects of history are unanticipated and unforeseen, predictable only in retrospect: the fall of the Berlin Wall is a single recent example. Yet in one vital area, the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases, we can already predict the future — and it is threatening and dangerous to us all.
The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases (most recently, hantavirus in the American West); epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas (for example, cholera in Latin America); diseases which become important through human technologies (as certain menstrual tampons favored toxic shock syndrome and water cooling towers provided an opportunity for Legionnaires’ Disease); and diseases which spring from insects and animals to humans, through manmade disruptions in local habitats.
To some extent, each of these processes has been occurring throughout history. What is new, however, is the increased potential that at least some of these diseases will generate large-scale, even worldwide epidemics. The global epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus is the most powerful and recent example. Yet AIDS does not stand alone; it may well be just the first of the modern, large-scale epidemics of infectious disease.
The world has rapidly become much more vulnerable to the eruption and, most critically, to the widespread and even global spread of both new and old infectious diseases. This new and heightened vulnerability is not mysterious. The dramatic increases in worldwide movement of people, goods, and ideas is the driving force behind the globalization of disease. For not only do people travel increasingly, but they travel much more rapidly, and go to many more places than ever before. A person harboring a life-threatening microbe can easily board a jet plane and be on another continent when the symptoms of illness strike. The jet plane itself, and its cargo, can carry insects bringing infectious agents into new ecologic settings. Few habitats on the globe remain truly isolated or untouched, as tourists and other travelers penetrate into the most remote and previously inaccessible areas in their search for new vistas, business, or recreation.
This new global vulnerability is dramatically illustrated by the history of HIV/AIDS. While its geographical origins remain uncertain, it is clear that the global spread of HIV was underway by the mid-1970s. By 1980, about 100,000 people worldwide were infected with HIV. Yet the discovery of AIDS, in California in 1981, and the subsequent identification of the causative virus, HIV, in 1983, resulted from a series of very fortunate circumstances.
In het voorwoord van Laurie Garett's baanbrekende boek wees professor Mann, (hoogleraar Gezondheid en Mensenrechten, Epidemiologie en Internationale Gezondheid van de prestigieuze Harvard School of Public Health, en directeur van het International AIDS Center Harvard AIDS Institute Cambridge, Massachusetts) er tevens op dat een voorhoede van onderzoekers en artsen:
Facing the unknown, at the frontiers of science, struggled and wrested from nature an insight which Laurie Garrett shares with us—that diseases will remain a threat, that disease and human activity are inextricable, and that nature has many hidden places and surprises still in store,
en dat:
This book sounds an alarm. The world needs—now—a global early-warning system capable of detecting and responding to new emerging infectious disease threats to health. There is no clearer warning than AIDS. Laurie Garrett has spelled it out clearly for us. Now we ignore it at our peril.
Let wel, Laurie Garrett, een 'Pulitzer Prize winning reporter,' schreef dit 750 pagina's tellende werk al meer dan een kwarteeuw geleden. Zelf merkte zij op dat:
In 1981 Dr. Richard Krause of the U.S. National Institutes of Health published a provocative book entitled The Restless Tide: The Persistent Challenge of the Microbial World,1 which argued that diseases long thought to have been defeated could return to endanger the American people. In hearings a year later before the U.S. Congress, Krause was asked, 'Why do we have so many new infectious diseases?' 'Nothing new has happened,' Krause replied. 'Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.'
But the shock of the AIDS epidemic prompted many more virus experts in the 1980s to ponder the possibility that something new was, indeed, happening. As the epidemic spread from one part of the world to another, scientists asked, 'Where did this come from? Are there other agents out there? Will something worse emerge — something that can be spread from person to person in the air?'
The questioning grew louder as the 1980s dragged on. At a Rockefeller University cocktail party, a young virologist named Stephen Morse approached the institution’s famed president, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, and asked him what he thought of the mounting concern about emerging microbes. Lederberg characteristically responded in absolute terms: 'The problem is serious, and it’s getting worse.' With a sense of shared mission, Morse and Lederberg set out to polltheir colleagues on the matter, gather evidence, and build a case.
By 1988 an impressive group of American scientists, primarily virologists and tropical medicine specialists, had reached the conclusion that it was time to sound an alarm. Led by Morse and Lederberg of Rockefeller University, Tom Monath of the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and Robert Shope of the Yale University Arbovirus Research Unit, the scientists searched for a way to make tangible their shared concern. Their greatest worry was that they would be perceived as crybabies, merely out to protest shrinking research dollars. Or that they would be accused of crying wolf.
On May 1, 1989, the scientists gathered in the Hotel Washington, located across the street from the White House, and began three days of discussions aimed at providing evidence that the disease-causing microbes of the planet, far from having been defeated, were posing ever-greater threats to humanity. Their gathering was co-sponsored by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Fogarty International Center, and Rockefeller University.
Terwijl de westerse mainstream-journalistiek lange tijd weigerde te beseffen hoe ernstig de waarschuwingen van de wetenschappelijk geschoolde deskundigen waren, noteerde Garrett:
'Nature isn’t benign,' Lederberg said at the meeting’s opening. 'The bottom lines: the units of natural selection—DNA, sometimes RNA elements—are by no means neatly packaged in discrete organisms. They all share the entire biosphere. The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary program. Abundant sources of genetic variation exist for viruses to learn new tricks, not necessarily confined to what happens routinely, or even frequently.'
University of Chicago historian William McNeill outlined the reasons Homo sapiens had been vulnerable to microbial assaults over the millennia. He saw each catastrophic epidemic event in human history as the ironic result of humanity’s steps forward. As humans improve their lots, McNeill warned, they actually increase their vulnerability to disease.
'It is, I think, worthwhile being conscious of the limits upon our powers,' McNeill said. 'It is worth keeping in mind that the more we win, the more we drive infections to the margins of human experience, the more we clear a path for possible catastrophic infection. We’ll never escape the limits of the ecosystem. We are caught in the food chain, whether we like it or not, eating and being eaten.'
For three days scientists presented evidence that validated McNeill’s words of foreboding: viruses were mutating at rapid rates; seals were dying in great plagues as the researchers convened; more than 90 percent of the rabbits of Australia died in a single year following the introduction of a new virus to the land; great influenza pandemics were sweeping through the animal world; the Andromeda strain nearly surfaced in Africa in the form of Ebola virus; megacities were arising in the developing world, creating niches from which 'virtually anything might arise'; rain forests were being destroyed, forcing disease-carrying animals and insects into areas of human habitation and raising the very real possibility that lethal, mysterious microbes would, for the first time, infect humanity on a large scale and imperil the survival of the human race.
Bovendien was al bijna drie decennia het volgende bekend, zonder dat de commerciele media hieraan uitgebreid en structureel aandacht besteedden:
In February 1991 the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which is part of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, convened a special panel with the task of exploring further the questions raised by the 1989 scientific gathering and advising the federal government on two points: the severity of the microbial threat to U.S. citizens and steps that could be taken to improve American disease surveillance and monitoring capabilities. In the fall of 1992 the IOM panel released its report, Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States, which concluded that the danger of the emergence of infectious diseases in the United States was genuine, and authorities were ill equipped to anticipate or manage new epidemics.
'Our message is that the problem is serious, it’s getting worse, and we need to increase our efforts to overcome it,' Lederberg said on the day of the report’s release.
After the release of the report, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta began a soul-searching process that would, by the spring of 1994, result in a plan for heightened vigilance and rapid response to disease outbreaks. The slow response to the emergence of HIV in 1981 had allowed the epidemic to expand by 1993 to embrace 1.5 million Americans and cost the federal government more than $12 billion annually in research, drug development, education, and treatment efforts.
Tot zover de feiten met betrekking tot 'The Coming Plague,' en de 'newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance.' Ik verwijs naar dit uitgebreid gedocumenteerde, baanbrekende, boek van Laurie Garrett omdat tot mijn grote verbazing op maandag 23 maart 2020 Geert Mak in het inmiddels verdwenen televisieprogramma De Wereld Draait Door werd opgevoerd als deskundige op het gebied van de Corona Virus. Algemeen bekend is dat de polderspers buitensporige bewondering toont voor alles waarover Mak een mening te berde brengt, dus zo ongeveer over alles waarmee de mainstream-pers zich kortstondig bezig houdt. Maar toch was dit opnieuw een voorlopig dieptepunt. In plaats van Garrett te interviewen of de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Mike Davis die in 2005 in zijn alarmerende boek The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu had gewaarschuwd voor een nieuwe pandemie, dook mijn oude vriend op om het televisie-publiek uit te leggen: 'hoe het coronavirus onze wereld gaat veranderen.' Zijn optreden was een schoolvoorbeeld van hoe in het kleine Nederland een slecht geïnformeerde opiniemaker telkens weer van stal wordt gehaald om zijn gebrek aan kennis te etaleren, zonder dat de polderpers zich hiervoor schaamt. Luiheid en vriendjespolitiek heeft Nederland intellectueel gezien op grote achterstand gezet bij cultuurlanden als Frankrijk, Italië, Duitsland, en zelfs de Verenigde Staten. Acht jaar geleden schreef Geert Mak in een email aan mij:
Je mails zetten mij aan het denken, zoals je opmerkingen dat vaker doen. Het probleem met jou is dat je verdomd vaak gelijk hebt, en dat het vaak geen prettige mededelingen zijn die je te melden hebt. Jij ziet veel dingen scherper en eerder, maar,’
zo stelde hij,
Ik kan niet zonder hoop, Stan, dat klinkt misschien wat pathetisch, maar het is toch zo.
Zo had ik mijn oude vriend Geert meer dan een decenniunm geleden ook gewezen op professor Davis' boek over op handen zijnde wereldwijde pandemieën. Maar omdat hij niet 'zonder hoop' kon, en hij en zijn tijdgeest 'grote verwachtingen' koesterde, was het destijds commercieel onmogelijk om met slecht nieuws te komen. Pas nu is zijn publiek rijp om de dagelijkse werkelijkheid te vernemen. En dus was het onvermijdelijk dat naast een televisie-optreden Mak in mei 2020 met een 'EPILOOG bij Grote verwachtingen' kwam, dat met de historische woorden begon:
Als een donderslag bij heldere hemel waren wij aan de beurt. Wij, de zondoorstoofde generaties van deze decennia, werden in het voorjaar 2020 plotseling uit onze roes wakker geschopt en proefden het vergeten woord 'noodlot' op onze tong.
En niemand van mijn wakkere mainstream-journalisten die deze snake oil peddler ontmaskert. Daarover de volgende keer meer.
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