Just Finished Reading: The Viral Storm – The Dawn of the New Pandemic Age by Nathan Wolfe (FP: 2011) [255pp] 

Pandemics are, thankfully, rare events but as we are only too well aware they are not something confined to the past. With all of the media and political attention paid to the Covid-19 global pandemic we have all become much more familiar with historic events such as the ‘Spanish’ flu outbreak towards the end of WW1 as well as previous esoteric epidemiological concepts as the R(0) number – the rate at which infection spreads in a population, which means that pandemics are no longer as mysterious to the general population as they once were. Today, thanks in part to the work of the author of this fascinating short volume, we have a much greater understanding of what viruses are, how they are transmitted both between species and between humans, how they spread so quickly across the globe and, ultimately, where they come from and, by implication, where the next pandemics will emerge. 

Interestingly, it appears that all flu strains originate in birds. This virus then hops across the species barrier to a mammal – often pigs – and then to us. Generally, most viruses die at that point in the human host and go no further. Sometimes, although only rarely, they are either already compatible enough with humans to both make the host sick (or even kill them) and jump to others or they swap genes with an existing flu infection already in the host and produce something more akin to SARS or MERS. Very occasionally things go a step or two further with a world-wide pandemic like Covid-19. Although relatively mild, in the overall grand scheme of things, Covid proved to be highly infectious and spread across the world before we really knew what hit us. But flu isn’t the only pandemic we are either already dealing with or coming at us in the future. The classic example of HIV/AIDS that we are only now getting to grips with jumped the species barrier from ape virus SIV. Somewhat ironically it appears to have begun spreading outside its home reach because of a combination of economic and health improvements in Africa enabling people to more easily travel long distances coupled with misuse of needles in local hospitals. Only in the 1980’s, many decades after it emerged in the human population was it ‘discovered’ in the US. One can only imagine the difference if it had been identified much earlier and stopped in its tracks. 

We are, in some cases at least, creating a perfect storm for future pandemics. We crowd into cities that are ever more dense, more people than ever before move across the globe at subsonic speeds allowing viruses with ever shorter infection to symptom times to make it to other continents before people become visibly sick, we herd our increasingly homogenous food animals into closer and tighter groups allowing any infection to spread through them quickly, we are increasingly destroying natural habitats and encountering new diseases there and the growing ‘diseases of affluence’ increasingly compromises our immune systems and impacts our healthcare systems. It’s quite a toxic brew and it should come as no surprise that people like this author are sounding the alarm bells (well in advance of Covid-19). 

Of course, one of the positive outcomes of Covid is that not only have we had a pretty loud wake-up call but we’ve also put a lot of time and money into producing drugs and vaccines that can cope with, or at the very least mitigate, future outbreaks. Taken together with a global virus surveillance effort this could be the difference between ‘business as usual’ and, well, use your imagination. If you’re in the ‘headspace’ to read about pandemics yet or, like me, never left it, this is an interesting, somewhat reassuring if somewhat sobering read. The bad news is that Covid-19 isn’t going to be our last pandemic. The good news is that we’re not helpless in the face of such things if we take the problem seriously. Definitely recommended.