Tuesday 24 March 2020

'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'

A Plague | An Epidemic | A Pandemic

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! ;-)