Eliot and the Ebola Connect!
In the wake of the outbreak of
the dreaded Covid 19 in such pandemic proportions, there’s been a lot of doubt,
disquiet and dismay on the subject.
And in the present post-truth
society that we all inhabit everywhere around the world, there’s really been a
dearth in getting to know what is the truth, and what is in the disguise of
truth!
All the more reason why we need a bit
more of a clarity on the covid!
As such, this post seeks to explain
a few important concepts connected with covid, compiled, collected and collated
– NOTTT from user-edit-wiki wiki pedia ;-) - but rather from four highly authentic
and validating books on the subject – books that have been on the stacks for
more than a decade now!
[Let me add a quick rider too! Yup! for
a profound, insightful study on the subject, you are requested and also expected
;-) to look up some sound medical literature with covid connects! Thank you! ]
So now, here, we go!
In his book titled Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction,
McMillen outlines the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic in such
common, layperson terms!
McMillen here observes that, an epidemic is generally considered to
be an unexpected, widespread rise in disease incidence at a given time. A pandemic is best thought of as a very
large epidemic. Ebola in 2014 was by any measure an epidemic — perhaps even a
pandemic, while the influenza that killed fifty million people around the world
in 1918 was a pandemic, he observes.
As such, Tuberculosis, malaria,
and HIV/AIDS, which affect enormous swaths of the globe and kill millions and
millions each year, are persistent pandemics.
In short, scholars the world over
have suggested that to be deemed a ‘pandemic’, it must meet eight criteria, as
follows –
wide geographic extension,
disease movement,
high attack rates and explosiveness,
minimal population immunity,
novelty,
infectiousness,
contagiousness, and
severity.
McMillen adds to say that, an epidemic
or a pandemic cannot occur without a dense and mobile population. None of these
diseases emerged in pandemic form until humans had settled down to farm and
begun trading with one another.
Infectious diseases need to be
transmitted from host to host to survive; that host must be susceptible.
Smallpox remained such a killer among American Indians because it was able,
over centuries, to find non-immune populations; once those populations
diminished, the disease naturally declined.
Trade and travel were well developed
by the fourteenth century; the plague took advantage of this. TB exploded only
when conditions allowed it: the densely packed cities and workplaces of
industrializing Europe in the eighteenth century. AIDS has relied on human
mobility to move around the globe.
When pandemic influenza spread
around most of the planet in a matter of months in 1918, it could only have
done so because of the newly built transportation and trade networks and the
heightened mobility brought on by World War I.
Human, animal, and insect movement are
critical in the spread of epidemics and pandemics.
McMillen then proceeds to define a
plague!
A plague is defined as a disease we now know to
be caused by a bacillus, Yersinia pestis, transmitted by the bite of an
infected flea - a flea seeking a human host after its animal host died. It
first appeared in the sixth century ce when the first identifiable pandemic
occurred during the Byzantine Empire. It is commonly called the Plague of
Justinian after the eastern Roman emperor Justinian. The Greek historian Procopius
said that the plague claimed ten thousand lives in Constantinople in a single day
in 542.
The association between trade, travel,
and the plague was longstanding. That’s one reason why governments suggest a
lockdown period for a particular number of days, to contain travel and trade in
the intervening period!
Now, let’s have a glimpse into the term
‘corona’ and how it attained its current usage.
Dr. Alan P Zelicoff in his book
titled, Microbe: Are We Ready For The
Next Plague? describes a coronavirus
as the class of virus that causes mild respiratory disease in animals.
It is called a coronavirus because
when looked at under the electron microscope, the area around the virus takes
on a ghostly, whitish shade. At the right angle, it looks like a light halo, or
corona. So corona simply means, it resembles a ‘crown’ in its shape!
Michael B. A. Oldstone in his 2010 book
titled, Viruses, Plagues, And History:
Past, Present, And Future also gives a similar definition to the corona –
Corona refers to the crown-like appearance
of coronavirus, a circular core with spikelike projections of the surrounding
glycoproteins, as viewed by electron microscopy.
He then proceeds to list out the first
coronavirus that was discovered way back in the year 1937 by Beaudette & Hudson.
The duo are famous now for the discovery of infectious bronchitis virus of
chickens! (known as the first coronavirus).
In 1965, Tyrrell, Bynoe, Almeida, Hamre
& Procknow came up with their discovery of the human coronaviruses.
In 2003, Urbani, Peiris et al
discovered the SARS coronavirus.
Eminent American virologist
Nathan Wolfe, touted as a ‘charismatic rising star of the medical world’, has
done such an awesome analogy of sorts between Nobel Laureate Eliot’s poem and
the Ebola virus, to help us literary souls understand the impact of the virus
better-o-better! How sweet of Nathan, alley? ;-)
So here goes Wolfe, Nathan Wolfe, ladies
and gentlemen –
Viruses manage to function with such few
genes through a variety of tricks that allow them to maximize the impact of
their diminutive genomes. Among the most elegant is a phenomenon called
overlapping reading frames.
As an analogy, take a poem of around thirteen
thousand letters—say, T. S. Eliot’s poem The
Waste Land.
It has roughly the same number
of letters as the Ebola virus has base pairs.
When you read The Waste
Land, it has meaning, tempo, reference—all of the
characteristics we normally expect from literature.
In the same way, the genome
of the Ebola virus has meaning, with base pair letters making up genes that get
translated into the proteins that provide the virus with its capacity to function.
If you take the first stanza of
The Waste Land, around a thousand letters,
and begin to read it starting with the second letter instead and move the first
letters of the other words, it’s a disaster. “April is the cruelest month”
becomes “Prili sthec rueles tmonth.” Nonsense.
Now imagine that embedded within the
stanza was a second poem so that both readings, the one that starts with the
first letter and the one that starts with the second letter, lead to fluent
comprehensible verses.
Now imagine that you took the same
stanza and read it backward and that a third hidden stanza emerged from the
same letters.
This is precisely what viruses
can do. A good challenge to poets (or perhaps computer scientists) would be to
create such a stanza to see if they could be as creative as natural selection
has been with viruses.
Viruses with overlapping reading
frames use the same string of base pairs to code up to three different proteins,
an incredible genomic efficiency, which makes their small genomes pack a much
larger punch.
And this last paragraph by Nathan
so beautifully sums up the infinite expanse of the ocean out there, and our
little boat, our limited sphere of knowledge that is, again, powerless before
such microbial onslaughts of new orders that keep coming up again and again!
Here goes virus hunter Nat, Nathan
Wolfe yet again, ladies and gentlemen -
Our knowledge of microbes is still
young, says Nathan! This vast unseen world is critical to our planet and our
species, yet we understand very little about it. We’ve already discovered most
of the plant and animal life on our planet, but we regularly discover brand-new
microbes.
Ongoing studies of the diversity of
microbes in animals, plants, soils, and aquatic systems represent the tip of a
very large iceberg. The millions of specimens that will result from these
studies will catalyze our understanding of life.
Among other things, the knowledge
will help spark the development of new antibiotics. It will also help us
forecast the next pandemic. The microbial world is the “new world,” the last
frontier of undiscovered life on our planet.
Way to go, Nat!
Now, as this little post draws to a close, please allow me the
honour of doing a grand finish to this, our post with
a quote from Camus’ The Plague that
sounds so intense in its appeal!
Here goes –
‘What's natural is the microbe.
All the rest — health, integrity, purity (if you like) — is a product of the
human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who
infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention’.
Wowww! Ain’t it? ;-)
And well, the fab four books that I’d read
during these ‘Covid’ holidays, to do this post, are as follows -
Christian W. McMillen.
Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction.
OUP, 2016.
Michael B. A.
Oldstone. Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past,
Present, and Future. OUP, 2010.
Alan P Zelicoff & Michael
Bellomo. Microbe: Are We Ready For The
Next Plague? Amacom, 2005.
Nathan Wolfe. The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic
Age. Times Books, 2011.
PS: Please read the rider
on the fifth para to this post, yet again! ;-)