Pandemic

by Sonia Shah

  26. Dobson, “What Links Bats to Emerging Infectious Diseases?”; Sonia Shah, “The Spread of New Diseases: The Climate Connection,” Yale Environment 360 (Oct. 15, 2009).

  27. Randal J. Schoepp et al., “Undiagnosed Acute Viral Febrile Illnesses, Sierra Leone,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, July 2014.

  28. Pierre Becquart et al., “High Prevalence of Both Humoral and Cellular Immunity to Zaire Ebolavirus Among Rural Populations in Gabon,” PLoS ONE 5, no. 2 (2010): e9126.

  29. Sudarsan Raghavan, “‘We Are Suffering’: Impoverished Guinea Offers Refugees No Ease,” San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 25, 2001.

  30. Daniel G. Bausch, “Outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea: Where Ecology Meets Economy,” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, July 31, 2014; Sylvain Baize et al., “Emergence of Zaire Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea—Preliminary Report,” The New England Journal of Medicine, April 16, 2014.

  31. “Ebola in West Africa,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 14, no. 9 (Sept. 2014).

  32. C. L. Althaus, “Estimating the Reproduction Number of Ebola Virus (EBOV) During the 2014 Outbreak in West Africa,” PLoS Currents Outbreaks, Sept. 2, 2014.

  33. “UN Announces Mission to Combat Ebola, Declares Outbreak ‘Threat to Peace and Security,’” UN News Centre, Sept. 18, 2014.

  34. Denise Grady, “Ebola Cases Could Reach 1.4 Million Within Four Months, CDC Estimates,” The New York Times, Sept. 23, 2014.

  35. Sadie J. Ryan and Peter D. Walsh, “Consequences of Non-Intervention for Infectious Disease in African Great Apes,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 12 (2011): e29030.

  36. Interview with Anne Rimoin, Sept. 27, 2011.

  37. A. W. Rimoin et al., “Major Increase in Human Monkeypox Incidence 30 Years After Smallpox Vaccination Campaigns Cease in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, no. 37 (2010): 16262–67.

  38. D. S. Wilkie and J. F. Carpenter, “Bushmeat Hunting in the Congo Basin: An Assessment of Impacts and Options for Mitigation,” Biodiversity and Conservation 8, no. 7 (1999): 927–55.

  39. Sonia Shah, “Could Monkeypox Take Over Where Smallpox Left Off?” Scientific American, March 2013.

  40. J. O. Lloyd-Smith, “Quantifying the Risk of Human Monkeypox Emergence in the Aftermath of Smallpox Eradication,” Epidemics: Third International Conference on Infectious Disease Dynamics, Boston, Nov. 30, 2011.

  41. Dennis Normile, “Up Close and Personal with SARS,” Science 300, no. 5621 (2003): 886–87.

  42. “The Dog That’s Just Dyeing to Be a Tiger: How Chinese Owners Turn Their Pets into Exotic Wildlife in New Craze,” Daily Mail Online, June 9, 2010; John Knight, ed., Wildlife in Asia: Cultural Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2004); S. A. Mainka and J. A. Mills, “Wildlife and Traditional Chinese Medicine: Supply and Demand for Wildlife Species,” Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine 26, no. 2 (1995): 193–200.

  43. Knight, Wildlife in Asia.

  44. Lauren Swanson, “1.19850+ Billion Mouths to Feed: Food Linguistics and Cross-Cultural, Cross-‘National’ Food Consumption Habits in China,” British Food Journal 98, no. 6 (1996): 33–44.

  45. Anthony Kuhn, “A Chinese Imperial Feast a Year in the Eating,” NPR, Jan. 9, 2010.

  46. Eoin Gleeson, “How China Fell in Love with Louis Vuitton,” MoneyWeek, June 14, 2007.

  47. Interview with Jonathan Epstein, Sept. 17, 2009; L. M. Looi et al., “Lessons from the Nipah Virus Outbreak in Malaysia,” The Malaysian Journal of Pathology 29, no. 2 (2007): 63–67.

  48. A. Townsend Peterson et al., “Predictable Ecology and Geography of West Nile Virus Transmission in the Central United States,” Journal of Vector Ecology 33, no. 2 (2008): 342–52; A. Townsend Peterson et al., “West Nile Virus: A Reemerging Global Pathogen,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 7, no. 4 (2001): 611–14.

  49. Most of these people had “silent” infections; they were not sick. Drexler, Secret Agents, 72.

  50. A. Marm Kilpatrick, “Globalization, Land Use, and the Invasion of West Nile Virus,” Science, Oct. 21, 2011; Valerie J. McKenzie and Nicolas E. Goulet, “Bird Community Composition Linked to Human West Nile Virus Cases Along the Colorado Front Range,” EcoHealth, Dec. 2, 2010.

  51. Richard Ostfeld, “Ecological Drivers of Tickborne Diseases in North America,” International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, Atlanta, GA, March 13, 2012.

  52. “CDC Provides Estimate of Americans Diagnosed with Lyme Disease Each Year,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Aug. 19, 2013; Julie T. Joseph et al., “Babesiosis in Lower Hudson Valley, New York, USA,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 17 (May 26, 2011); Laurie Tarkan, “Once Rare, Infection by Tick Bites Spreads,” The New York Times, June 20, 2011.

  53. Felicia Keesing et al., “Impacts of Biodiversity on the Emergence and Transmission of Infectious Diseases,” Nature 468 (Dec. 2, 2010): 647–52.

  54. Beth Mole, “MRSA: Farming Up Trouble,” Nature, July 24, 2013.

  55. Drexler, Secret Agents, 136.

  2. LOCOMOTION

    1. “Control of Communicable Diseases, Restrictions on African Rodents, Prairie Dogs and Certain Other Animals,” Food and Drug Administration, Federal Register, Sept. 8, 2008.

    2. M. G. Reynolds et al., “A Silent Enzootic of an Orthpoxvirus in Ghana, West Africa: Evidence for Multi-Species Involvement in the Absence of Widespread Human Disease,” The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 82, no. 4 (April 2010): 746–54.

    3. Interview with Mark Slifka, Boston, Nov. 30, 2011.

    4. Lisa Warnecke et al., “Inoculation of Bats with European Pseudogymnoascus destructans Supports the Novel Pathogen Hypothesis for the Origin of White-nose Syndrome,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 18 (2012): 6999–7003; “White-Nose Syndrome (WNS),” USGS National Wildlife Health Center, www.nwhc.usgs.gov/disease_information/white-nose_syndrome/.

    5. Emily Badger, “We’ve Been Looking at the Spread of Global Pandemics All Wrong,” The Atlantic, CityLab, Feb. 25, 2013.

    6. “Threading the Climate Needle: The Agulhas Current System,” National Science Foundation, April 27, 2011.

    7. C. Razouls et al., “Diversity and Geographic Distribution of Marine Planktonic Copepods,” http://copepodes.obs-banyuls.fr/en.

    8. François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 40.

    9. Walter Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Perspecta, 12 (1969).

  10. N. P. Willis, Prose Works (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849).

  11. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1997), 308–10.

  12. Strains of Vibrio cholerae may have developed elsewhere in the world as well. There are historical accounts of earlier outbreaks that sound a lot like cholera. Ancient Sanskrit writings from 500 to 400 B.C. describe a cholera-like disease, as do historical accounts from ancient Greece and Rome. By the time Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of India in 1498, about twenty thousand men had already died of a disease that “struck them sudden-like in the belly, so that some of them died in 8 hours.” Thomas Sydenham described a cholera-like disease in Britain in 1669 and Rudyard Kipling described a scourge that destroyed visitors to Africa within twenty-four hours that could have been cholera, too. But it was in the Sundarbans that the first global pandemic began, and scientists believe that there was something particularly transmissible about the cholera vibrios that developed there. See Joan L. Aron and Jonathan A. Patz, eds., Ecosystem Change and Public Health: A Global Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 328; Colwell, “Global Climate and Infectious Disease.”

  13. Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7.

 
14. Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (New York: Penguin, 2005), 229.

  15. Washer, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 153.

  16. Evans, Death in Hamburg, 229.

  17. Marc Alexander, “‘The Rigid Embrace of the Narrow House’: Premature Burial & the Signs of Death,” The Hastings Center Report 10, no. 3 (June 1980): 25–31.

  18. Delaporte, Disease and Civilization, 43.

  19. Ibid., 27–48; N. P. Willis, “Letter XVIII: Cholera—Universal terror…” and “Letter XVI: the cholera—a masque ball—the gay world—mobs—visit to the hotel dieu,” Pencillings by the Way (New York: Morris & Willis, 1844).

  20. Delaporte, Disease and Civilization, 40, 43.

  21. Edward P. Richards, Katharine C. Rathbun, and Jay Gold, “The Smallpox Vaccination Campaign of 2003: Why Did It Fail and What Are the Lessons for Bioterrorism Preparedness?” Louisiana Law Review 64 (2004).

  22. Willis, Prose Works.

  23. Bank of the Manhattan Company, “Ships and Shipping of Old New York: A Brief Account of the Interesting Phases of the Commerce of New York from the Foundation of the City to the Beginning of the Civil War” (New York, 1915), 39.

  24. Even first-class passengers had to endure discomforts. Private sleeping cabins were cold, poorly ventilated, and dim, with beds consisting of just thin sacking over a board, hollowed out in the middle to prevent sleeping passengers from rolling off in heavy seas. Stephen Fox, The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships (New York: Harper, 2003), 7–14; “On the Water,” Maritime Nation, 1800–1850: Enterprise on the Water, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthewater/exhibition/2_3.html.

  25. Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera, 61.

  26. J. S. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera: America’s Greatest Scourge (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 298.

  27. J. T. Carlton, “The Scale and Ecological Consequences of Biological Invasions in the World’s Oceans,” in Odd Terje Sandlund et al., eds., Invasive Species and Biodiversity Management (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1999); Mike McCarthy, “The Iron Hull: A Brief History of Iron Shipbuilding,” Iron Ships & Steam Shipwrecks: Papers from the First Australian Seminar on the Management of Iron Vessels & Steam Shipwrecks (Fremantle: Western Australian Maritime Museum, 1985).

  28. Rita R. Colwell et al., “Global Spread of Microorganisms by Ships,” Nature 408, no. 6808 (2000): 49.

  29. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera, 201; Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 15–17.

  30. Steven Solomon, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (New York: Harper, 2010), 289.

  31. Ashleigh R. Tuite, Christina H. Chan, and David N. Fisman, “Cholera, Canals, and Contagion: Rediscovering Dr Beck’s Report,” Journal of Public Health Policy 32, no. 3 (Aug. 2011); Maximilian, Prince of Wied, “Early Western Travels, vol. 22: Part I of Maximilian, Prince of Weid’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832–1834” (Cleveland: A. H. Clark Co., 1906), 393.

  32. Bank of the Manhattan Company, “Ships and Shipping of Old New York,” 43; Solomon, Water, 289.

  33. There are only thirty-five locks on the Erie Canal today. www.eriecanal.org/locks.html. Ronald E. Shaw, Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790–1860 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), 44, 47; Sheriff, The Artificial River, 67, 72, 79.

  34. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera, 63, 91; Shaw, Canals for a Nation, 47; John W. Percy, “Erie Canal: From Lockport to Buffalo,” Buffalo Architecture and History (Buffalo: Western New York Heritage Institute of Canisius College, 1993).

  35. Percy, “Erie Canal.”

  36. Solomon, Water, 228.

  37. Chester G. Moore, “Globalization and the Law of Unintended Consequences: Rapid Spread of Disease Vectors via Commerce and Travel,” Colorado State University, Fort Collins, ISAC meeting, June 2011; EPA, “Growth of International Trade and Transportation,” www.epa.gov/oia/trade/transport.html; David Ozonoff and Lewis Pepper, “Ticket to Ride: Spreading Germs a Mile High,” The Lancet 365, no. 9463 (2005): 917.

  38. “Country Comparison: Airports,” CIA, The World Factbook, 2013.

  39. “Top 10 Biggest Ports in the World in 2011,” Marine Insight, Aug. 11, 2011.

  40. “Multi-modal Mainland Connections,” 2013, www.hongkongairport.com.

  41. Chris Taylor, “The Chinese Plague,” The Age, May 4, 2003; Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 70.

  42. Nathan Wolfe, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age (New York: Times Books, 2011), 160.

  43. Christopher R. Braden et al., “Progress in Global Surveillance and Response Capacity 10 Years After Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 19, no. 6 (2013): 864.

  44. “What You Should Know About SARS,” The Vancouver Province, March 23, 2003; Wolfe, The Viral Storm, 160; Forum on Microbial Threats, Learning from SARS: Preparing for the Next Disease Outbreak (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004); Davis, The Monster at Our Door, 72–73.

  45. Grady, “Ebola Cases Could Reach 1.4 Million”; David Kroll, “Nigeria Free of Ebola as Final Surveillance Contacts Are Released,” Forbes, Sept. 23, 2014.

  46. “India’s Wealth Triples in a Decade to $3.5 Trillion,” The Economic Times (India), Oct. 9, 2010.

  47. “Medical Tourism in the Superbug Age,” The Times of India, April 17, 2011.

  48. “Medanta the Medicity,” www.medanta.org/about_gallery.aspx.

  49. Amit Sengupta and Samiran Nundy, “The Private Health Sector in India,” BMJ 331, no. 7526 (Nov. 19, 2005): 1157–58; George K. Varghese et al., “Bacterial Organisms and Antimicrobial Resistance Patterns,” The Journal of the Association of Physicians of India 58 supp. (December 2010): 23–24; Dawn Sievert et al., “Antimicrobial-Resistant Pathogens Associated with Healthcare-Associated Infections: Summary of Data Reported to the National Healthcare Safety Network at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009–2010,” Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology 34, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 1–14.

  50. Maryn McKenna, “The Enemy Within,” Scientific American, April 2011, 46–53; Chand Wattal et al., “Surveillance of Multidrug Resistant Organisms in Tertiary Care Hospital in Delhi, India,” The Journal of the Association of Physicians of India 58 supp. (Dec. 2010): 32–36; Timothy R. Walsh and Mark A. Toleman, “The New Medical Challenge: Why NDM-1? Why Indian?” Expert Review of Anti-Infective Therapy 9, no. 2 (Feb. 2011): 137–41.

  51. CDC, “Detection of Enterobacteriaceae Isolates Carrying Metallo-Beta-Lactamase—United States, 2010,” June 25, 2010, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5924a5.htm; Deverick J. Anderson, “Surgical Site Infections,” Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 25, no. 1 (2011): 135–53; M. Berrazeg et al., “New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase Around the World: An eReview Using Google Maps,” Eurosurveillance 19, no. 20 (2014).

  52. Interview with Chand Wattal, Jan. 9, 2012.

  3. FILTH

    1. Richard G. Feachem et al., Sanitation and Disease: Health Aspects of Excreta and Wastewater Management, World Bank Studies in Water Supply and Sanitation 3 (New York: John Wiley, 1983); Uno Winblad, “Towards an Ecological Approach to Sanitation,” Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, 1997.

    2. Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 2.

    3. Joan H. Geismar, “Where Is Night Soil? Thoughts on an Urban Privy,” Historical Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1993): 57–70; Laura Noren, Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York: NYU Press, 2010); Ewald, Evolution of Infectious Disease, 80.

    4. Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitiz
ed History (New York: North Point Press, 2007), 43; Solomon, Water, 251–53.

    5. George, The Big Necessity, 2.

    6. Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean; Solomon, Water.

    7. Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean, 94.

    8. Solomon, Water, 253.

    9. Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean, 95, 100, 107.

  10. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to Present, abridged ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 12.

  11. Benedetta Allegranzi et al., “Religion and Culture: Potential Undercurrents Influencing Hand Hygiene Promotion in Health Care,” American Journal of Infection Control 37, no. 1 (2009): 28–34; Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean, 59, 75.

  12. Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera, 8.

  13. George, The Big Necessity, 8.

  14. John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City 1625–1866 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968), 18; Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12, 21.

  15. Melosi, The Sanitary City, 115.

  16. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Plume, 2001), 74, 86.

  17. Eric W. Sanderson, Manahatta: A Natural History of New York City (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009), 215; Duffy, A History of Public Health, 185, 363.

  18. Duffy, A History of Public Health, 364.

  19. Asa Greene, A Glance at New York: Embracing the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers, Rogues, Dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquids, &c., &c. (New York: A. Greene, 1837).

  20. Argonne National Laboratory, “Cleaning Water Through Soil,” Nov. 6, 2004, www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen01/gen01688.htm.

  21. Koeppel, Water for Gotham, 9; Sanderson, Manahatta; 87.

  22. Greene, A Glance at New York.