The Plague Cycle

by Charles Kenny

  20. Stephen W. Hargarten and S. P. Baker, “Fatalities in the Peace Corps, A Retrospective Study: 1962 Through 1983,” Journal of the American Medical Association 254 (1985): 1326–1329. See also Prakash Bhatta, P. Simkhada, E. Van Teijlingen, and S. Maybin, “A Questionnaire Study of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) Volunteers: Health Risk and Problems Encountered,” Journal of Travel Medicine 16, no. 5 (2009): 332–337.

  21. Julie Y. Huang, Alexandra Sedlovskaya, Joshua M. Ackerman, and John A. Bargh, “Immunizing Against Prejudice: Effects of Disease Protection on Attitudes Toward Out-Groups,” Psychological Science 22, no. 12 (2011): 1550–1556.

  22. B. Dupont, A. Gandhi, and T. J. Weiss, The American Invasion of Europe: The Long Term Rise in Overseas Travel, 1820–2000, no. w13977, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008.

  23. Data source: World Bank Databank, https://databank.worldbank.org/home.aspx.

  24. New America Economy Research Fund, “Immigrant Healthcare Workers Are Critical in the Fight Against Covid-19,” https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/covid-19-immigrant-healthcare-workers/.

  25. Data from Starbucks (http://www.starbucks.com/business/international-stores) and OECD statistics (https://data.oecd.org/fdi/fdi-stocks.htm).

  26. Angus Maddison, “The West and the Rest in the World Economy: 1000–2030,” World Economics 9, no. 4 (2008): 75–99.

  27. Charles Kenny, The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Good for the West (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

  28. Chad Bown, “COVID-19: Trump’s Curbs on Exports of Medical Gear Put Americans and Others at Risk,” Peterson Institute for International Economics blog, https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/covid-19-trumps-curbs-exports-medical-gear-put-americans-and.

  29. US Geological Survey, “Cobalt Statistics and Information,” http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cobalt/mcs-2016-cobal.pdf.

  30. World Health Organization, The World Medicines Situation (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2004).

  31. Helen Branswell, “Against All Odds,” STAT, January 7, 2020, https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story-scientists-produced-world-first-ebola-vaccine/.

  32. Charles I. Jones and Paul M. Romer, “The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2, no. 1 (2010): 224–245.

  33. Luis Angeles, “Demographic Transitions: Analyzing the Effects of Mortality on Fertility,” Journal of Population Economics 23, no. 1 (2010): 99–120.

  34. David Roodman, “The Impact of Life Saving Interventions on Fertility,” David Roodman blog, April 16, 2014, http://davidroodman.com/blog/2014/04/16/the-mortality-fertility-link/.

  35. David E. Bloom and David Canning, Global Demographic Change: Dimensions and Economic Significance, no. w10817, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2004.

  36. Stefania Albanesi and Claudia Olivetti, Gender Roles and Medical Progress, no. w14873, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009.

  37. Mark Schaller and Damian Murray, “Infectious Disease and the Creation of Culture,” Advances in Culture and Psychology 1 (2011).

  38. Charles Kenny and Dev Patel, Norms and Reform: Legalizing Homosexuality Improves Attitudes, CGD Working Paper 465, Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, 2017.

  39. Daniel Cohen and Laura Leker, Health and Education: Another Look with the Proper Data, no. 9940, CEPR Discussion Papers, 2014; see also Casper Worm Hansen, The Effect of Life Expectancy on Schooling: Evidence from the International Health Transition, Discussion Papers of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, 2012.

  40. Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, “AIDS Reversal of the Demographic Transition and Economic Development: Evidence from Africa,” Journal of Population Economics 25, no. 3 (2012): 871–897.

  41. Emily Oster, “HIV and Sexual Behavior Change: Why Not Africa?” Journal of Health Economics 31, no. 1 (2012): 35–49.

  42. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), pp. 159–161. Azar Gat, a professor of national security at Tel Aviv University, examined the relationship between the decline of war and the process of modernization and suggested it involved a number of interacting elements. These included the escape from Malthusianism, economic development, commercial interdependence, growing risk aversion, urbanism, liberal attitudes including those toward sexual freedom, aging demographics, and the changing role of women. We have seen all of these factors are in turn linked to declining infection (Azar Gat, The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound? [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017], Chapter 6.)

  43. Dean T. Jamison et al., “Global Health 2035: A World Converging Within a Generation,” Lancet 382, no. 9908 (2013): 1898–1955, and Jeffrey Sachs and Pia Malaney, “The Economic and Social Burden of Malaria,” Nature 415, no. 6872 (2002): 680–685.

  44. See William Easterly and Ross Levine, “Tropics, Germs, and Crops: How Endowments Influence Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary Economics 50, no. 1 (2003): 3–39, on the relative contribution.

  45. Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt, and Fabrice Murtin, The Relationship Between Health and Growth: When Lucas Meets Nelson-Phelps, no. w15813, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010; see also Suchit Arora, “Health, Human Productivity, and Long-Term Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History 61, no. 3 (2001): 699–749.

  46. Sourced from the Maddison Project website, https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-2018.

  47. Data from the original Angus Maddison database, https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/?lang=en.

  Chapter Nine: The Revenge of Infection?

  1. Lisa Benton-Short, M. D. Price, and S. Friedman, “Globalization from Below: The Ranking of Global Immigrant Cities,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (2005): 945–959.

  2. Burnet noted the risk of emergent diseases but predicted “they will presumably be safely maintained.” Macfarlane Burnet and David White, Natural History of Infectious Disease (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 263.

  3. CDC MMWR, June 5, 1981 / 30(21): 1–3, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/june_5.htm.

  4. Faria et al., “The Early Spread and Epidemic Ignition of HIV-1 in Human Populations,” Science 346, no. 6205 (2014): 56–61.

  5. David Serwadda et al., “Slim Disease: A New Disease in Uganda and Its Association with HTLV-III Infection,” Lancet 326, no. 8460 (1985): 849–852.

  6. J. Steinberg, “AIDS Prevention Is Thicker Than Blood. Zimbabwe,” Links 9, no. 2 (1992): 3–3.

  7. Emily Oster, “Routes of Infection: Exports and HIV Incidence in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of the European Economic Association 10, no. 5 (2012): 1025–1058.

  8. Jim Todd et al., “Editorial: Measuring HIV-Related Mortality in the First Decade of Anti-Retroviral Therapy in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Global Health Action 7 (May 2014).

  9. World Health Organization data on number of deaths due to HIV/AIDS, http://www.who.int/gho/hiv/epidemic_status/deaths_text/en/.

  10. Katherine F. Smith et al., “Global Rise in Infectious Disease Outbreaks,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 6, no. 11 (2014).

  11. David M. Morens, Gregory K. Folkers, and Anthony S. Fauci, “Emerging Infections: A Perpetual Challenge,” Lancet Infectious Diseases 8, no. 11 (2008): 710–719.

  12. David M. Morens, Gregory K. Folkers, and Anthony S. Fauci, “The Challenge of Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases,” Nature 430, no. 6996 (2004): 242–249, and CDC information on Nipa, http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/nipah/symptoms/index.html.

  13. Dorothy Crawford, The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 34.

  14. Benjamin L. Hart, “Behavioral Adaptations to Pathogens and Parasites: Five Strategies,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 14, no. 3 (1990): 273–294.

  15. See also Robert
De Vries et al., “Three Mutations Switch H7N9 Influenza to Human-Type Receptor Specificity,” PLoS Pathogens 13, no. 6 (2017). A final source of new infectious challenges is the recognition that old diseases considered noninfectious sometimes have an infection as a cause—liver cancer caused by hepatitis B, ulcers caused by Helicobacter pylori, and cervical cancer caused by human papillomavirus, for example.

  16. CDC MMWR Weekly, April 24, 2009, 58/15, “Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Infection in Two Children—Southern California, March–April 2009.” Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5815a5.htm.

  17. CDC MMWR Weekly, May 8, 2009, 58/17, “Update: Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections—Worldwide, May 6, 2009.” Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5817a1.htm.

  18. Sundar S. Shrestha et al., “Estimating the Burden of 2009 Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) in the United States (April 2009–April 2010),” Clinical Infectious Diseases 52, suppl. 1 (2011): S75–S82.

  19. FAOStat data from http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QL.

  20. Kimberly Elliott, Feeding the Future or Favoring American Farmers (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2016).

  21. David Tilman et al., “Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Production Practices,” Nature 418, no. 6898 (2002): 671–677.

  22. Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh, “A Taste for Pork Helped a Deadly Virus Jump to Humans,” Goats and Soda, NPR, February 25, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/02/25/515258818/a-taste-for-pork-helped-a-deadly-virus-jump-to-humans.

  23. FAOStat data from http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QL.

  24. Joyce Dargay, Dermot Gately, and Martin Sommer, “Vehicle Ownership and Income Growth, Worldwide: 1960–2030,” Energy Journal (2007): 143–170.

  25. Andrew J. Tatem, David J. Rogers, and S. I. Hay, “Global Transport Networks and Infectious Disease Spread,” Advances in Parasitology 62 (2006): 293–343.

  26. Dorothy Crawford, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 5–6.

  27. Tatem et al., “Global Transport Networks.”

  28. Our World in Data, Coronavius, https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus.

  29. Ronald Barrett et al., “Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases: The Third Epidemiologic Transition,” Annual Review of Anthropology (1998): 247–271.

  30. Gillian K. SteelFisher, Robert J. Blendon, and Narayani Lasala-Blanco, “Ebola in the United States—Public Reactions and Implications,” New England Journal of Medicine 373, no. 9 (2015): 789–791.

  31. Casey B. Mulligan, Economic Activity and the Value of Medical Innovation During a Pandemic, University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper 2020-48, 2020.

  32. Paolo Bajardi et al., “Human Mobility Networks, Travel Restrictions, and the Global Spread of 2009 H1N1 Pandemic,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 1 (2011).

  33. Council on Foreign Relations (2020), Tracking Coronavirus in Countries With and Without Travel Bans, https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/tracking-coronavirus-countries-and-without-travel-bans.

  34. Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester, How US Travel Restrictions on China Affected the Spread of Covid-19 in the United States, Cato Working Paper no. 58, 2020.

  35. Principles for Responsible Investment, “CES Convention May Have Spread Coronavirus Throughout the US—and World,” April 24, 2020, https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-04-24/ces-convention-may-have-spread-coronavirus-throughout-us-and-world.

  36. “2 Californians Died of Coronavirus Weeks Before Previously Known 1st US Death,” CNN, April 22, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/california-deaths-earliest-in-us/index.html.

  37. Steve Eder et al., “430,000 People Have Traveled from China to U.S. Since Coronavirus Surfaced,” New York Times, April 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/coronavirus-china-travel-restrictions.html.

  38. David Bier, “US Airports Had 10.7 Million Entries from Countries with Covid-19 Cases,” Cato blog, https://www.cato.org/blog/us-airports-had-107-million-entries-nations-covid-19.

  39. Doug Saunders, “Why Travel Bans Fail to Stop Pandemics,” Foreign Affairs, May 15, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/canada/2020-05-15/why-travel-bans-fail-stop-pandemics.

  40. From the Council on Foreign Relations global list of travel bans: https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/travel-restrictions-china-due-covid-19.

  41. Julia Hollingsworth, “How New Zealand ‘Eliminated’ Covid-19,” CNN, April 28, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/asia/new-zealand-coronavirus-outbreak-elimination-intl-hnk/index.html.

  42. Joseph Amon and Katherine Todrys, “Fear of Foreigners: HIV-Related Restrictions on Entry, Stay, and Residence,” Journal of the International AIDS Society 11, no. 1 (2008): 8.

  43. Tatem et al., “Global Transport Networks.”

  44. Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future, National Academy of Medicine, Secretariat, The Neglected Dimension of Global Security: A Framework to Counter Infectious Disease Crises, (National Academy of Medicine, 2015) http://www.nap.edu/catalog/21891/the-neglected-dimension-of-global-security-a-framework-to-counter.

  45. Davide Furceri, Prakash Loungani, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Pietro Pizzuto, “Will Covid-19 Affect Inequality? Evidence from Past Pandemics,” Covid Economics 12 (2020): 138–157.

  46. CDC map of US plague locations, http://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/.

  Chapter Ten: Abusing Our Best Defenses

  1. McNeil et al., “How a Medical Mystery in Brazil Led Doctors to Zika,” New York Times, February 7, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/health/zika-virus-brazil-how-it-spread-explained.html.

  2. Julia Belluz, “Zero: The Number of New Zika Cases from the Rio Olympics,” Vox, September 3, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/9/3/12774610/numer-zika-cases-olympics.

  3. Jon Cohen, “Zika Has All But Disappeared in the Americas. Why?” Science, August 16, 2017, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/zika-has-all-disappeared-americas-why.

  4. R. Lourenço-de-Oliveira et al., “Aedes aegypti in Brazil: Genetically Differentiated Populations with High Susceptibility to Dengue and Yellow Fever Viruses,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 98, no. 1 (2004): 43–54.

  5. Maria de Lourdes G. Macoris et al., “Resistance of Aedes aegypti from the State of São Paulo, Brazil, to Organophosphates Insecticides,” Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz 98, no. 5 (2003): 703–708.

  6. Global Burden of Disease data from http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/gbd/visualizations/gbd-cause-patterns. The low number is produced by adding HIV/AIDS and tuberculoisis, diarrhea, LRI, other infections, NTD, and malaria, along with the category “other communicable diseases.” The high number adds neonatal disorders and nutritional deficiencies.

  7. World Health Organization data, http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates/en/index1.html. I calculate infectious diseases as communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional deaths (Group One), subtracting all maternal, neonatal, and nutritional deaths apart from those attributable to sepsis.

  8. World Health Organization global immunization data, http://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/global_immunization_data.pdf.

  9. Data from WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Report on Drinking Water and Sanitation, http://www.unwater.org/publications/jmp/en/.

  10. This is about changing behaviors, which can be deeply ingrained and culturally determined. Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, Sanitation and Health Externalities: Resolving the Muslim Mortality Paradox, University of Texas at Austin Working Paper, 2014.

  11. Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, “The Politics of Prevention: Anti-Vaccinationism and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century England,” Medical History 32, no. 3 (1988): 244.

  12. D. Trambaiolo, “Vaccination and the Politics of Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88, no. 3 (2014): 431–456.

  13. Mahatma Gandhi, A Guide to He
alth (Aukland, NZ: The Floating Press, 2014).

  14. Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).

  15. BBC News, “Swansea Measles Epidemic: Worries over MMR Uptake After Outbreak,” June 10, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-23244628.

  16. Paul A. Offit, Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2007), pp. 159–168.

  17. Olga Khazan, “Wealthy LA Schools’ Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan’s,” The Atlantic, September 16, 2004, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-la-schools-vaccination-rates-are-as-low-as-south-sudans/380252/.

  18. Varun Phadke et al., “Association Between Vaccine Refusal and Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in the United States: A Review of Measles and Pertussis,” JAMA 315, no. 11 (2016): 1149–1158.

  19. Seth Mnookin, “The Return of Measles,” Boston Globe, September 28, 2013, http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/09/28/true-cost-not-vaccinating-the-return-measles/4PBenymtmf0CE9WOT1FUWI/story.html.

  20. Quoted in Peter Lipson, “Anti-Vaccine Doctors Should Lose Their Licences,” Forbes, January 30, 2015.

  21. H. J. Larson et al., “The State of Vaccine Confidence 2016: Global Insights Through a 67-Country Survey,” EBioMedicine 12 (2016): 295–301.

  22. Alex Kemper, Matthew Davis, and Gary Freed, “Expected Adverse Events in a Mass Smallpox Vaccination Campaign,” Effective Clinical Practice 5 (2002): 84–90.

  23. BBC News, “Kano Shuns Nigeria Polio Campaign,” December 12, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3313419.stm.

  24. BBC News, “White House: CIA Has Ended Use of Vaccine Programmes,” May 20, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-27489045.

  25. “Pakistan Polio Vaccinator’s Murder by Militants Raises Health Workers’ Fears,” Guardian, March 25, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/25/pakistan-polo-vaccinators-murder-militants-salma-farooqi.

  26. Edgar Chavez et al., Eradicating Polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mimeo, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2012.