Zoonoses

If there’s a new phrase we’ve learned from Covid-19, one contender could be zoonotic diseases: when a bug (be it a bacterium, protist, or virus) makes the leap from one reservoir species (usually mammalian) to humans. While zoonoses have afflicted humankind since, perhaps the beginning of what we might call the dawn of civilization, there seems to be an uptick in the last several decades. My subconscious must be dwelling on all this since I’ve chosen to spend my time reading, watching video, and playing boardgames related to epidemics or worse, global pandemics.

 

First, the book. I’m reading Spillover by David Quammen. He’s a brave traveler and superb writer. I’ve only read one of his books thus far, but his other books are now on my reading list. Spillover was written back in 2012, and Quammen has essentially chronicled the rise of zoonoses – why they occur and why they are accelerating. The encroachment of humans into virgin territory, mass domestication of animals for food or other products, the increase in human population in density and spread, easy global travel, climate change, and not to forget the prime directive of biology to replicate, replicate, replicate. Quammen devastatingly lays out why we should expect the Big One of global pandemics to hit. Less than a decade later, here we are.

 

At the beginning of Covid, I read Mark Honigsbaum’s 2019 book The Pandemic Century alongside other books about the complexity of systems and what happens when they cannot respond robustly to a fast-evolving situation. Quammen’s 2012 book gets into the guts of the stories and the individuals involved – he goes out and interviews firsthand witnesses on the frontlines, those who hadn’t been killed by some awful outbreaks, and visits live-food markets, rat farms and bat caves. His narrative of the early days of SARS is even more eye-opening than Honigsbaum’s. Reading his account also explains why East Asia was so much more prepared than the rest of the world when Covid-19 hit, having fumbled their way through SARS. But even back then in 2003, they acted fast and they got very lucky. That’s Quammen’s read of the situation in hindsight, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

 

Second, a TV series and a movie. The past fortnight, I’ve been watching the first season of The Last Ship. A global virulent pandemic has wiped out much of the human population. Governments have fallen. There are pockets of survivors. A U.S. Destroyer with its crew that includes a virologist is on a radio-silence four-month mission out in the Arctic and returns to both silence and mayhem. We don’t know much about the virus although it seems to be zoonotic. But the TV series is mostly about people and how they act and react to the situations thrown up at them in this brave new world. I just watched the season finale where the ship and crew make landfall back in the U.S.; I’m not sure how I feel about where the story arc might be heading. (I have the DVD set of the second seasn on hold at my local library.) In any case, parts of the first season reminded me of Battlestar Galactica (the remake), one of the few series I’ve watched from beginning to end. Similar situation, but different.

 

This weekend, I decided to watch 12 Monkeys, the Terry Gilliam movie from 1995 with Bruce Willis as the main protagonist. I had seen it when it was first released and thought it was a confusing mess – probably because it was my first Terry Gilliam movie. I vaguely remembered something to do with time travel and a global pandemic that wipes out most of the human population, but other than that I hardly remembered anything in the storyline. I was pleasantly surprised that in this second viewing, I thought the time-loop narrative was cleverly told. The virus itself does not feature prominently.

 

Third, the boardgames. After playing Pandemic early in the pandemic at the super-hard level of six epidemics (my final tally was winning 7 out of 20 games), I took a long break from it. Until this weekend. The two games were both losses, although one was down to the wire and was an almost-win. I’m back to including the expansion (mixing in the new roles and special cards) with five epidemics (two regular and three virulent strain). That was my preferred level pre-pandemic.

 

On the other hand, my isolation for most of this year led me to revisit Origins: How We Became Human. It’s a funky civilization-ish game starting with primitive humans discovering technology, both the good and the bad, and making their way into the end of the twentieth century. I’ve immersed myself in exploring the game system and I’m really enjoying it; I might even write a strategy guide for the game. One feature of the game is that to progress to the “first energy level”, one has to domesticate animals which carries the risk of picking up a zoonotic disease which is a setback to your civilization. Then you acquire immunity, but other diseases lurk and can wreak havoc. It’s not the main story of the game, but it’s one factor among many that you have to watch out for.

 

I’m so ready for 2021 to be over. But I think zoonoses are here to stay. Is Covid-19 the Big One? Perhaps. But there’s likely to be another Big One, and possibly another and another. Reading Quammen’s book has convinced me that will be the case. I hope there won’t be too many in my lifetime. And I realize it’s quite possible one of them could end my lifetime.