The Pandemic Century

by The Pandemic Century- One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria

  206 “human T-cell leukemia viruses”: Bernard J. Poiesz et al., “Detection and Isolation of Type C Retrovirus Particles from Fresh and Cultured Lymphocytes of a Patient with Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 77, no. 12 (December 1980): 7415–19. Following isolation of the same virus by a Japanese research group, the L in HTLV was changed to “lymphotropic.”

  206 “from each previous isolate”: Grmek, History of AIDS, 65.

  207 extensively by other writers: Grmek, History of AIDS, 60–70; Nikolas Kontaratos, Dissecting a Discovery: The Real Story of How the Race to Uncover the Cause of AIDS Turned Scientists against Disease, Politics against Science, Nation against Nation (Xlibris Corp, 2006); Gallo, Virus Hunting; Luc Montagnier, Virus: The Co-Discoverer of HIV Tracks Its Rampage and Charts the Future (New York and London: Norton, 2000).

  207 named the virus HTLV-III: Jon Cohen, Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine (New York: Norton, 2001), 7–10.

  207 never made this claim: Kontaratos, Dissecting a Discovery, 274–75.

  208 encourage cell-line growth: Grmek, History of AIDS, 63.

  209 “virus in the culture”: F. Barré-Sinoussi, “HIV: A Discovery Opening the Road to Novel Scientific Knowledge and Global Health Improvement,” Virology 397, no. 2 (February 20, 2010): 255–59; Patrick Strudwick, “In Conversation With . . . Françoise Barré-Sinoussi,” Mosaic, accessed October 19, 2016, https://mosaicscience.com/story/francoise-barre-sinoussi.

  210 of the viruses separately: Gallo, Virus Hunting, 143.

  210 “it also led me wrong”: NIH, “In Their Own Words,” 4, 31.

  210 “the discoverer of HIV”: Grmek, History of AIDS, 71.

  210 “imposed on other things”: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 58.

  211 stigmatization of people with AIDS: Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (London: Allen Lane, 1989), 25–26.

  212 “someone who mattered,” he wrote: David France, How To Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS (London: Picador, 2016), 189.

  213 “epidemic of fear”: Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (New York and London: Penguin Viking, 1988), 302.

  213 could spread the disease: Anthony S. Fauci, “The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: The Ever-Broadening Clinical Spectrum,” Journal of the American Medical Association 249, no. 17 (May 6, 1983): 2375–76.

  214 take similar precautions: Shilts, And The Band Played On, 299–302.

  214 household or social contact: L. K. Altman, “The Press and AIDS,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 64, no. 6 (1988): 520–28.

  214 AIDS-infected second grader: Evan Thomas, “The New Untouchables,” Time, September 23, 1985.

  214 flee in terror: Colin Clews, “1984–85. Media: AIDS and the British Press,” Gay in the 80s, January 28, 2013, accessed October 24, 2016, http://www.gayinthe80s.com/2013/01/1984–85-media-aids-and-the-british-press/.

  215 decontaminate his car: John Tierney, “The Big City; In 80’s, Fear Spread Faster Than AIDS,” New York Times, June 15, 2001.

  215 patients in New York: CDC, “Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia among Homosexual Men—New York City and California,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 30, no. 25 (July 3, 1981): 305–8.

  215 a “gay plague”: Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 3, 1981; ” ‘Gay plague’ Baffling Medical Detectives,” Philadelphia Daily News, August 9, 1982.

  215 flight attendant Gaetan Dugas: CDC, “A Cluster of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia among Homosexual Male Residents of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, California,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 31, no. 23 (June 18, 1982): 305–7.

  216 “posthumous notoriety”: Richard A. McKay, ” ‘Patient Zero’: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88 (2014): 161–94, 178.

  217 homosexual or otherwise: Gerald M. Oppenheimer, “Causes, Cases, and Cohorts: The Role of Epidemiology in the Historical Construction of AIDS,” in Elizabeth Fee and Daniel Fox, AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 50–83.

  217 “ecology” of STDs: Garrett, Coming Plague, 270–71.

  218 use of poppers: Report of the Centers for Disease Control Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, “Epidemiologic Aspects of the Current Outbreak of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections,” New England Journal of Medicine 306, no. 4 (January 28, 1982): 248–52.

  218 described themselves as heterosexual: Michael Marmor et al., “Risk Factors for Kaposi’s Sarcoma in Homosexual Men,” The Lancet 319, no. 8281 (May 15, 1982): 1083–87; Henry Masur et al., “An Outbreak of Community-Acquired Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia,” New England Journal of Medicine 305, no. 24 (December 10, 1981): 1431–38.

  218 four from New York: D. M. Auerbach et al., “Cluster of Cases of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Patients Linked by Sexual Contact,” American Journal of Medicine 76, no. 3 (March 1984): 487–92.

  218 “Ooh, that’s catchy”: McKay, “Patient Zero,” 172–73.

  219 “the Columbus of AIDS”: McKay, “Patient Zero,” 182; France, How to Survive a Plague, 87.

  219 to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation: “Patient Zero,” People, December 28, 1987.

  220 AIDS in the United States: The New York samples were closely related to a strain from Haiti, suggesting that someone arriving from Haiti had introduced AIDS to the United States. Jon Cohen, ” ‘Patient Zero’ No More,” Science 351, no. 6277 (March 4, 2016): 1013; Michael Worobey et al., “1970s and ‘Patient 0’ HIV-I Genomes Illuminate Early HIV/AIDS History in North America,” Nature 539, no. 7627 (November 3, 2016): 98–101.

  221 referring to the disease as AIDS: CDC, “AIDS: The Early Years and CDC’s Response,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 60, no. 4 (October 7, 2011): 64–69.

  221 tested positive for LAV: Garrett, Coming Plague, 350.

  222 infected with HTLV-III: Garrett, Coming Plague, 352. These were later considered false positives, causing a lot of resentment in Africa.

  222 the problem in Zaire: In 1995 Peter Piot became executive director of the United Nations AIDS agency, UNAIDS.

  222 wards were infected with AIDS: Peter Piot et al., “Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome in a Heterosexual Population in Zaire,” The Lancet 324, no. 8394 (July 1984): 65–69.

  222 HIV infections in their clients: P. Van de Perre et al., “Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome in Rwanda,” The Lancet 2, no. 8394 (July 14, 1984): 6–65; T. C. Quinn et al., “AIDS in Africa: An Epidemiologic Paradigm, 1986,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 79, no. 12 (2001): 1159–67.

  223 positive for the virus: Edward Hooper, The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS (London: Penguin, 1999), 95–96.

  223 and contracted the virus: Jacques Pepin, The Origins of AIDS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–11.

  224 twenty-seven years: A. J. Nahmias et al., “Evidence for Human Infection with an HTLV III/LAV-like Virus in Central Africa, 1959,” The Lancet 1, no. 8492 (May 31, 1986): 1279–80.

  224 median of 1921: Michael Worobey et al., “Direct Evidence of Extensive Diversity of HIV-1 in Kinshasa by 1960,” Nature 455, no. 7213 (October 2, 2008): 661–64.

  224 possibly as early as 1921: Pepin, The Origins of AIDS, 41.

  225 evidence against his theory overwhelming: “AIDS Origins, Edward Hooper’s site on the origins of AIDS,” accessed November 2, 2016, http://www.aidsorigins.com/.

  226 according to one study: Responding to the study, Duesberg repeated his argument that AIDS is not a specific disease but a battery of previously known and specific diseases and that HIV is merely “a harmless passenger virus.” Therefore, Mbeki’s decision to withhold AZT did not contribute to the death toll. To
prove his point, Crawford reports that at one point, Duesberg even offered to inject himself with AIDS. Dorothy H. Crawford, Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 10–12.

  226 its last endemic centers: Celia W. Dugger and Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Rumor, Fear and Fatigue Hinder Final Push to End Polio,” New York Times, March 20, 2006; Stephen Taylor, “In Pursuit of Zero: Polio, Global Health Security and the Politics of Eradication in Peshawar, Pakistan,” Geoforum 69 (February 2016): 106–16.

  226 simian versions of AIDS: To date serological evidence of SIV infection has been found in forty species of primates. These viruses appear to be largely non- pathogenic in their natural hosts, despite clustering together with the human and simian AIDS viruses in a single phylogenetic lineage. Paul M. Sharp and Beatrice H. Hahn, “Origins of HIV and the AIDS Pandemic,” Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine 1, no. 1 (September 2011): 1–22.

  226 Pan troglodytes troglodytes chimpanzees: The term spillover was popularized by the science writer David Quammen, and refers to a single event where a pathogen moves from one species to another, typically as a result of contamination with blood or other bodily fluids. However, anthropologists and sociologists have criticized the term as overly simplistic. In particular, they argue that the focus on bushmeat hunting and the consumption of game in spillover events overlooks other types of “contact” between animals and humans in traditional rural settings. Tamara Gilles-Vernick, “A multi-disciplinary study of human beings, great apes, and viral emergence in equatorial Africa (SHAPES),” accessed September 21, 2017, https://research.pasteur.fr/en/project/a-multi-disciplinary-study-of-human-beings-great-apes-and-viral-emergence-in-equatorial-africa-shapes/.

  227 than they are to one another: The simian progenitor virus of HIV-I is thought to be a hybrid virus consisting of two monkey viruses that chimpanzees probably acquired from eating other monkeys.

  227 had not managed to do: Pepin, The Origin of AIDS, 50.

  228 New York, and San Francisco: Pepin, The Origin of AIDS, 1–5.

  228 treatment was administered: Pepin, The Origin of AIDS, 110–11.

  230 the favored scenario: Sharp and Hahn, “Origins of HIV and the AIDS Pandemic.”

  231 quinine to treat malaria: Pepin, The Origin of AIDS, 224.

  231 timber from equatorial Africa: Nathan Wolfe, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 161–63.

  234 pressures on microparasites: Viruses, bacteria, and protozoa are all examples of microparasites. In disease ecology, parasitism designates a nonsymbiotic relationship in which one species, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, usually referred to as the host.

  234 rules of “viral traffic”: Stephen S. Morse, “Emerging Viruses: Defining the Rules for Viral Traffic,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 34, no. 3 (1991): 387–409.

  234 “an epidemiologic ‘bridge’”: Joshua Lederberg, Robert E. Shope, and S. C. Oaks, eds., Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992), 34–35, 83.

  235 “more vulnerable than before”: Joshua Lederberg, “Infectious Disease as an Evolutionary Paradigm,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 3, no. 4 (December 1997): 417–23.

  235 pandemics to come: Garrett, Coming Plague, xi.

  CHAPTER VII: SARS: “SUPER SPREADER”

  238 “the strongest constitutions”: Arthur Starling and Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, eds., Plague, SARS and the Story of Medicine in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 2.

  239 two square meters: Stephen Boyden et al., The Ecology of a City and Its People: The Case of Hong Kong (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1988), 1.

  240 broiler chickens a year: Tamara Giles-Vernick and Susan Craddock, eds., Influenza and Public Health: Learning from Past Pandemics (London and Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2010), 125.

  241 “monster at our door”: Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New York: The New Press, 2005), 58–60.

  243 “this huge explosion”: Malik Peiris, interview with author, Hong Kong, March 27, 2017.

  244 respiratory tract infection: The initial tests were conducted at the Hong Kong Department of Health. Subsequently, the samples were forwarded to the CDC in Atlanta and laboratories in London and Rotterdam, where they were identified as H5N1. Alan Sipress, The Fatal Strain: On the Trail of Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic (New York and London: Penguin 2010), 53–54; Pete Davis, The Devil’s Flu: The World’s Deadliest Influenza Epidemic and the Scientific Hunt for the Virus That Caused It (Henry Holt, 2000), 8–12.

  244 multi-organ failure: Scientists would subsequently blame the boy’s death on the unusual genetic properties of the virus and its effect on white blood cells associated with inflammatory responses. By inducing the release of proinflammatory cytokines, it is thought the H5N1 virus induced an extreme autoimmune reaction known as a “cytokine storm.” Robert G. Webster, “H5 Influenza Viruses,” in Y. Kawaoka , ed., Influenza Virology: Current Topics (Caister Academic Press, 2006), 281–98; C. Y. Cheung et al., “Induction of Proinflammatory Cytokines in Human Macrophages by Influenza A (H5N1) Viruses: A Mechanism for the Unusual Severity of Human Disease?” The Lancet 360, no. 9348 (2002): 1831–37.

  244 English turkey farm in 1991: Davis, The Devil’s Flu, 46–47.

  244 two of the chicks: Sipress, The Fatal Strain, 57.

  245 “Trojan ducks”: Mark Honigsbaum, “Robert Webster: ‘We Ignore Bird Flu at Our Peril,’ ” The Observer, September 17, 2011, accessed April 13, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/17/bird-flu-swine-flu-warning.

  246 pathology in young adults: The statement is by Jeffery Taubenberger, the molecular biologist who in 2005 sequenced all eight genes of the 1918 Spanish flu together with colleagues at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Bethesda, Maryland. Taubenberger is now chief of viral pathogenesis and evolution at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “The 1918 flu virus is resurrected,” Nature 437 (October 6, 2005): 794–95.

  246 from their aquatic reservoirs: K. F. Shortridge et al., “The Next Influenza Pandemic: Lessons from Hong Kong,” Journal of Applied Microbiology 94 (2003): 70S-79S.

  246 guinea fowl in southern China: Y. Guan et al., “H9N2 Influenza Viruses Possessing H5NI-Like Internal Genomes Continue to Circulate in Poultry in Southeastern China,” Journal of Virology 74, no. 20 (October 2000): 9372–80.

  247 “multiple reassortants”: K. S. Li et al., “Characterization of H9 Subtype Influenza Viruses from the Ducks of Southern China: A Candidate for the Next Influenza Pandemic in Humans?,” Journal of Virology 77, no. 12 (June 2003): 6988–94.

  247 “bird flu epidemic had started”: Donald G. McNeil and Lawrence K. Altman, “As SARS Outbreak Took Shape Health Agency Took Fast Action,” New York Times, May 4, 2003, accessed October 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/world/as-sars-outbreak-took-shape-health-agency-took-fast-action.html.

  249 the nickname “poison king”: Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 19.

  249 “a very virulent disease”: Kung-wai Loh and Civic Exchange, eds., At the Epicentre: Hong Kong and the SARS Outbreak (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), xvi.

  249 He was wrong: “Solving the Metropole Mystery,” in World Health Organization, SARS: How A Global Epidemic Was Stopped (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2006), 141–48; CDC, “Update: Outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—Worldwide, 2003,” MMWR 52, no. 12 (March 28, 2003): 241–48.

  252 “super spreader” event: Alison P. Galvani and Robert M. May, “Epidemiology: Dimensions of Superspreading,” Nature 438, no. 7066 (November 17, 2005): 293–95.

  253 nearly closed the hospital: Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague, 64–67; Raymond S. M. Wong and David S. Hui, “Index Patient and SARS Outbreak in Hong Kong,” Emerging Inf
ectious Diseases 10, no. 2 (February 2004): 339–41.

  253 Chan recalled: Alexandra A. Seno and Alejandro Reyes, “Unmasking SARS: Voices from the Epicentre,” in Loh and Civic Exchange, eds., At the Epicentre, 1–15 (10).

  254 logical place to start: Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague, 70–75.

  254 vertically between each floor: “Lockdown at Amoy Gardens,” in WHO, SARS, 155–62.

  255 or a terrorist organization: The anthrax mailings, which began one week after 9/11, were the worst biological attacks in US history. In all, five Americans were killed and seventeen were sickened when letters containing anthrax spores arrived at the offices of two congressmen and several news outlets. After a lengthy investigation the FBI concluded the attacks had been perpetrated by a disgruntled microbiologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had committed suicide shortly before he was due to be arrested. However, the National Academy of Sciences subsequently cast doubt on the agency’s findings, accessed February 19, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks.

  255 Tsang explained: Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague, 73.

  256 first official SARS patient: David L. Heymann and Guenael Rodier, “SARS: Lessons from a New Disease,” in S. Kobler et al., eds., Learning from SARS: Preparing for the Next Disease Outbreak: Workshop Summary (Washington, DC: National Academies Press [US], 2004).

  256 in the hospital’s history: “How a Deadly Disease Came to Canada,” The Globe and Mail, accessed February 4, 2017, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-a-deadly-disease-came-to-canada/article1159487/.

  258 “produced the same effect”: Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague, 111.

  258 Chan’s clearly was: At that time, a suspect case of SARS was defined as anyone exhibiting fever, cough, or shortness of breath and who had had close contact with a suspect or probable case or who had recently been in an area where transmission had occurred. A probable SARS case had all the features of a suspect case plus X-ray, laboratory, or autopsy findings consistent with the disease.