While we're at it, it's worth noting there was a New-York Magazine. Someone should start up a magazine just called York, to confuse people who hear about the new York magazine.
Infocom, the makers of the Zork adventure game, at one point had a newsletter called "The New Zork Times", but changed it presumably in response to legal threats.
Indeed! And I think technically I shouldn't have capitlized "Magazine," I think it's just a magazine called "New York." So I only led you to introduce a new error into this blog.
Not to mention the New York Times Magazine, the Sunday insert of that newspaper; I believe the magazine has a separate editorial staff from the newspaper, although the Sunday Times itself is not independent of the daily newspaper. (As opposed to the Sunday Times of London, which is separate from the Times, although both are owned by Murdoch's News Corp. ANYHOO.)
New York Magazine was founded in 1968, and by the early 1970s had become so trendy in the region that The New Yorker was taking out full-page ads [in, like, the New York Times, so there ya go] plugging their latest cool stories, with the tag line "Yes, The New Yorker."
Presumably they're waiting for Newfoundland and New Mexico to crack and change their names first, for fairness' sake. Or maybe nobody in the New World (the World formerly known as New?) is willing to first until those smug Newcastle jerks finally admit that their castle is now actually quite old.
When I commented above I didn’t realise I had a contender for the crown. The New Forest in southern England is 300 years older than New College: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Forest.
This was my exact thought. I even hesitated to click because "Oh. no. New Yorker! This is gonna be huge and I have to go out in an hour." I clicked anyway and was like "Oh, it's New York magazine. That's not so bad."
The full genome was published in 2005. I supposed I didn't consider it important what exact tools scientists used to revive the virus when the outcome was fully functional Spanish flu was "revived/resurrected/restored" whatever. The tools to do that are far more widespread and available than they were in 2007
This supports the "scientists are a big concern" for the source of revived pandemics case. The genomes of a lot of viruses are freely available (or easily accessed behind a paywall). Also, the cost of doing some of this research might seem like a non-trivial factor, but there's a surprisingly large do-it-yourself community in the molecular genetics space. And the cost of lyophilized DNA is cheap. As in, you can buy a few hundred base pairs for less than a hundred dollars, cheap.
This is broader than just permafrost diseases, he argues we should monitor areas with risk of natural spillovers, but avoid sampling viruses that might be dangerous or predicting how dangerous they'd be, since it gives a laundry list of dangerous bioweapons to anyone that might access it and want to use it.
It's somewhat analogous to how Toby Ord argued that any technology that can manipulate asteroids is more likely to be used by a human to get us a strike on purpose than to prevent the Earth getting hit by an asteroid, but of course we know the base rate per century of asteroid strikes on Earth is tiny, while for natural pandemics it's not so tiny (not that this avoids the risk being mainly manmade)
Hmm, I would think it's much easier for a human to manipulate an asteroid that is currently on course for Earth to not hit it than for a human to manipulate an asteroid that is currently not on course for Earth to hit it. Only a tiny fraction of trajectories should hit Earth any time soon, so getting something that is currently on one of those trajectories off of it seems much easier than getting something currently not on it onto it.
As of two days ago, CNEOS is aware of 2238 potentially hazardous asteroids, up 4 from the start of the month; 160 of them are over a kilometer in size. https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/totals.html
Beyond looking things up, why care about rates? There only needs to be one asteroid that can be diverted towards Earth for this to be something worth caring about.
Modest proposal that this kind of research should probably only be permitted off-world, in facilities with infrequent and neurotically safetyist contact with the rest of civilization. Viral outbreaks on Enceladus or Charon (how appropriate) are going to be much easier to contain than, for a completely hypothetical example, in Wuhan.
Once we have colonies offworld, with enough extra capacity to spend time researching topics that aren't directly related to either to survival or economic activity, I would suspect there would be enough regular transit of people and material that accidental transmission would be entirely possible.
yes, but thats cold comfort when some of our best minds are already scouring the permafrost so they can resurrect the worst plagues and then publishing handy recipes on exactly how to do it in ways that dont require any original pathogenic material at all, and only required a few thousand dollars in 2007 and basicn biology know how.
also. These were not random corpses stumbled upon. They were recorded deaths of spanish flu that were known to be buried in permafrost. The proper response to discovering corpses in a particular area harbor spanish flu is napalm.
No, it sure doesn't. Thawing out the permafrost will prevent microbiologists from having such a source to access. We need to increase carbon emissions as a pandemic prevention measure.
I agree, the risk isn't from ancient diseases that have never seen humans so much as modern diseases that have previous experience working in the human environment.
Nobody would expect a random bacterium to survive in the Dead Sea. There's a reason extremophiles exist, and it's because they've adapted to living in a difficult environment. The same is the case with any species that has been developing independently for millennia. Much easier to not just infect one person (that's the 'easy' part) but maintain effective person-to-person transmission if you've been working that angle for a long time.
Or if you were engineered in a lab to be really good at it. Problem with being engineered in a lab is that then you might have really strong binding to, say, a human receptor you need access to in order to enter into cells, but then suck at getting into other species where you can hide out between outbreaks. You'd be more deadly, sure, but you'd need to quickly broaden your scope beyond humans in order to make sure you can perpetuate in non-human species. Moving between species, when both have immune systems that are trying to target you, is a tough game.
There's a lot that goes into making a really strong pandemic pathogen. Every tall kid thinks they can play in the NBA, but it takes a lot of special training to make it happen. Talent alone isn't enough. Same for potential pathogens.
Why are microbiologists seemingly more reckless than other scientists? Who in their right mind would publish the genome of the Spanish flu? You don't see physicists publishing blueprints for atomic bombs.
Active malware copies are more comparable to individual viruses (as they indeed used to be called), whereas manuals on how to effectively make your own aren't much widespread. Which makes sense, even the blackest hat hacker won't get much value out of openly leaking his secrets for free.
There are malware programming kits out there, but their efficiency isn't great, because antivirus/antimalware companies will update their products very quickly and render the required vulnerabilities unusable.
Our immune systems cannot be "updated" anywhere as quickly.
Well that might be relevant if anyone knew how to create zero-day exploits of the immune system. But viruses don't, having no brains, and it is well beyond *our* knowledge at the moment. Maybe in 100 years or so we will figure out how to do that, and then we'll be in the position of those of us in 1985 who wondered whether Lise Meitner should've just kept her mouth shut in 1938 about the possible explanation for why Otto Hahn saw barium in the neutron-activated decay of uranium.
But physicists do publish the underlying equations for nuclear physics. You're comparing an engineered application of published physics to an actual publication of biological science. The comparator to the nuclear bomb would be the systems used to recreate Spanish Flu, not the scientific data.
Physicists don't usually _have_ blueprints for atomic bombs. The ones that do tend to have gone through enough NDAs, Top Secret clearances and whatnot to know better. Unfortunately the equipment and techniques necessary for sequencing the Spanish flu genome are very similar to those needed for sequencing any other genome and are thus relatively ubiquitous.
Unfortunately this is true - a competent virologist could reproduce a flu virus with a reverse genetics system without too much difficulty or a huge amount of resources. Leaders of that particular field need to be much more transparent about the risks of what they do.
There are really a couple of factors in play there.
1) the PRC is notorious for taking revenge on people who say mean things about them, and they've made it quite clear that they consider that possibility such a "mean thing",
2) For a variety of reasons, loyalty to the West and fear of external threats have become associated with Scott's Red Tribe; thus, mocking this became a signal of membership in the Blue Tribe.
3) The coronavirus gain-of-function experiments which took place in Wuhan were funded by the US. It is plausible that blame for the pandemic can be attributed to a chain of reckless decisions starting in Congress and ending at NIH and Ecohealth. These decision makers still wield influence, and like the PRC leadership they do not stand to benefit from inquiry.
Well, there's this working hypothesis that part of the requirement of being an adult, or a nation of same, is that you (singular or plural) exercise responsibility when it comes to dangerous technology -- and you band together with your like-minded friends and allies to take effective police action against miscreants or idiots who do not -- and that attempting to keep all dangerous technology secret and only in the hands of a select well-chosen super-responsible few is (1) not the way free men want to live, and (2) not effective anyway.
You can download plans for a fully automatic weapon off the Internet and use a CNC machine to make it. Or if you're a Columbian narco gang you can probably buy surplus Soviet weapons on the international market. A complete amateur (like Tim McVeigh) can buy a ton or two of fertilizer in a feed store and then some motor oil and make a bomb that can take down a building. You can peruse the open chemistry literature and then use a variety of readily available chemicals to synthesize dangerous drugs, powerful explosives, and deadly poisons, and wreak havoc in some neighborhood, or poison a water supply and kill tens of thousands, et cetera. None of this tends to keep us up at night, because we count on almost everybody not wanting to do that kind of thing in the first place, and that the remaining few weirdos will generally be held in approximate check by fear of what the rest of us will do to them if they cut loose. That doesn't reduce the risk to zero, of course, but then life doesn't generally seem to admit of zero risks in any other category anyway.
For that matter, only a n00b would attempt to weaponize flu, even the 1918 version. It's not nearly deadly enough, there's no way to control it or protect your own people against it, and it mutates far too fast (which means it readily *stops* being as bad as you might initially design it to be). The go-to bioweapon of choice has historically been anthrax, which has a mortality when inhaled *even with treatment* of 50-100%, does not spread from person to person (so your own people are safe), and the bacteria of which can be cultured and then the spores readily weaponized (e.g. made highly inhalable) cheaply, and stored almost indefinitely -- no fancy RNA synthesis lab required.
Did anyone with any practical knowledge consider that to be the case though? After all, there's some people who think racial equality is an X risk, but we don't tend to listen to them!
It's pretty well-known how to make a gun-type device (like Little Boy), actually, although building an implosion-type device (like Trinity or Fat Man) is much more involved.
The bottleneck on terrorist nukes is that you need >50 kg of ~90% U-235 in order to make a Little Boy, which if you're trying to make it from scratch means >6 tonnes of unenriched uranium, a giant facility full of centrifuges (presumably sucking down something close to a megawatt), and months to years of uninterrupted operation. That's a rather-large undertaking for a non-state actor when it also has to be kept secret (otherwise everyone drops everything to stop them, because terrorist nukes are bad).
Yeah, this is a risk I am surprised the author didn't discuss. Someone finds a few useful shreds of DNA, stitches together a new nightmare virus etc. This would be a lot more 2020ish.
> Here is a great article about a guy who digs up ancient Indian burial grounds, searching for samples of especially severe flus. If only we had some sort of cultural folk memory that warned people against doing that kind of thing!
Hah, I'm actually not sure if this is a reference to anything in particular. Is it referencing Pet Sematary or something?
Manchester (the one in England, not New Hampshire) discovered an old graveyard when building a new light rail line through the city centre a few years ago. Getting the permissions to exhume the bodies and rebury them took two years and actually doing the work also bloated the budget by about a hundred million dollars.
If it had been anything other than a public sector public budget project with an essentially unlimited budget, it would have killed the entire project.
.... and this is a graveyard that was closed in the 1840s, so it's not like these people had living relatives who remembered them.
I should add: these things have been very well-managed and the other lines haven't gone over budget and have regularly come in ahead of deadline; this wasn't an example of public sector bloat, just discovering something that was a dramatically bigger problem than expected.
The only detailed written records were from the 1890s when the road was built over the graveyard, and they only mentioned 120 graves; when excavated, there turned out to be a second complete layer of graves under the recorded layer, resulting in a much bigger and deeper excavation, finding 280 graves eventually. That's not something you can plan for in advance.
Of course, this doesn't compare to some of the archaeological finds for underground railways in places like Rome and Istanbul - finding the Eleutherios port with the only ever complete quinquereme is possibly the biggest one; that delayed the Marmaray project by at least four years.
> In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million
Something weird is going on here. Seems like the sentence about the frozen women is out of place?
They're also inconsistent about whether they use em dashes or hyphens to separate clauses; the first two paragraphs use em dashes, the last one uses hyphens.
And I thought there was at least one more, but I can no longer find it.
Yeah, there's cause for optimism. We're not adapted to weird ancient diseases, but they're also not adapted to us.
Some of the most fascinating scientific questions relate to aliens. (By "aliens" I mean any lifeform dropped into a totally new environment, not grays with anal probes.) You'd think the alien would die in the strange environment - often this is true! But sometimes aliens have a competitive advantage.
Rabbits in England are preyed upon by a host of animals, which holds their fitness in check. But when they were brought to Australia, a place with few or no natural predators, they took over. Their alienness gave them an advantage. The country now has a hundred and fifty million feral rabbits - about eight times more rabbits than people.
Agricultural crops often do best far away from their native land, where pests and pathogens are adapted to them. New-world maize and cocoa are among the biggest crops in Africa. Conversely, most coffee is grown in South America. Sometimes being far from home is a good thing.
The diseases spread by the Columbian expansion were famously very bad for the Native Americans, and that's definitely the alien advantage in action. So why won't permafrost viruses do the same to us?
Probably because "alien advantage" falls off quickly. You can't be too ill-suited for your environment or your fitness goes away. So there's a weird curve in play: "close" diseases (that we come into contact with regularly) normally aren't that bad: our bodies have built up defenses to them. "Far" diseases (such as the smallpox that wiped out the Taino) are worse. But VERY far diseases hit a species barrier and become harmless, unless they can cross over.
I seem to recall that DNA breaks down too far to be useful after 10,000 years? I'm not sure if that's a rule of thumb or a solid barrier, as I've heard both. Either way, it makes extremely old viable cells pretty unlikely.
Some bacteria and yeasts and molds and amoebas and such can get into a dormant state where the cell survives for a long time (sometimes by a bunch of cells banding together and creating a dried out spore or something). But I think viruses need to be in a host cell to survive long, and host cells from mammals usually can't get into this kind of dormant state.
Oddly though rabbits are alien to Britain as well (I've heard both Arabian and Iberian origins suggested). They were introduced by the Romans. So presumably the difference here was that for whatever reason, perhaps creatures already adapted to hunt the native hare, was that Britain had predators that could hunt rabbits effectively (fox, stoat, larger birds of prey, wolves) whereas for some reason the Australian predators couldn't. Which is odd: there's small marsupials that approximately fill the rabbit niche in the ecosystem, so what happened to their predators? Is this a case of human intervention disrupting the predators?
Human intervention certainly did disrupt the predators (Australia was near the end of the March of Man), and marsupials are not really on par with placentals anyway, but there's presumably more going on than that considering foxes and dogs have also been introduced to Australia (the latter prior to white settlement; dingoes are feral dogs).
How bad the old world diseases were for the Native Americans is actually extremely controversial. From what data we actually have, smallpox fatality rates amongst Native Americans appears to have only been about 30% - which is the same as it was in Europeans.
Moreover, recent mRNA studies suggest that the total decline in population was probably only about 50% from peak to trough, which isn't too surprising, given that the 90%+ estimates were always wildly implausible based on archaeological evidence.
Supposing smallpox reappeared, how long would we need to be able to restart vaccine production? I assume patents on smallpox vaccines are now expired and anyone who wants to can produce a vaccine, but I'm also sure it would take some time.
> However, Smallpox vaccination is a bit rough (live virus), if you think anti-vaxers are bad with Covid, wait until they get their hands on some documented actual injuries. I guess no one has been working on how to make a gentler smallpox vaccine for a while.
Any reason we couldn't do mRNA vaccine? Live smallpox virus vaccines seem terrifying.
> if you think anti-vaxers are bad with Covid, wait until they get their hands on some documented actual injuries.
Eh, actually, about them - maybe they'd react better to them. They seem to trust in obsolete vaccine tech more than modern. At least they claim so.
The traditional way to do smallpox vaccines is to deliberately infect the patient with _cowpox_, not with smallpox. You get the same immunity, but without the permanent disfigurement and high chance of death.
I'm old enough to have had the smallpox vaccine, when I was 5 years old. It was painful, and I had two sites on my arm that developed a minor version of smallpox. The oozing sores healed in about 2 weeks. I suspect that with the anti-vax and the safetyism sentiments today, those vaccinated and recovering would be made to self-isolate for the 2 weeks
> I had two sites on my arm that developed a minor version of smallpox.
Not really. There are several related viruses. The vaccine has never contained smallpox. It was originally cowpox, and is now a virus specific to smallpox vaccine the origins of which are not understood.
"...is now a virus specific to smallpox vaccine the origins of which are not understood."
...How on earth can the origins of a virus used to provide a vaccine 'not be understood'? Did some anonymous researcher mail a hundred vials of an unknown substance to the CDC and told them to grow more in chicken eggs?
I'm not an expert on vaccine development, but I suspect if push came to shove we'd develop something gentler fairly quickly. (Probably in 2-3 months, then wait another year for the FDA and state-level logistics to stop tripping up over their shoelaces.)
On a bit of a tangent, anti-vaxxing always strikes me as a strange political tactic to employ if you want to criticise the establishment- there's plenty of ways that public health authorities have been glaringly dishonest and incompetent without trying to assault their fortress at the strongest point. The lab leak hypothesis has the preponderance of evidence in it's favour at this point, for example, and the Wuhan lab was probably getting funding for gain-of-function research from the FDA. "The US government indirectly helped to engineer a plague that killed millions worldwide" is probably a stronger criticism than "newer vaccines are slightly more likely to cause allergic reactions and are not a panacea, also big pharma greedy".
I'd also say, for the sake of completeness, that if smallpox actually made a serious comeback I'd be 100% in favour of vaccine mandates. A disease that could wipe out 10-20% of the species, often children, really would legitimate the hammer of state power coming down in full force.
I might even have supported vaccine mandates if we'd actually had vaccines for COVID from day one- I was certainly in favour of travel bans and mandatory quarantines for anyone getting off the plane from Wuhan just after the outbreak, whereas at the time even the obviously symptomatic were being allowed to go to conferences in Vegas, which was pretty sociopathic.
But I think that window has passed for COVID, and between the imperfect effectiveness of vaccines themselves, the endless treadmill of new strains emerging, the reasonably high level of voluntary compliance and the generally low mortality rate of the disease for most age groups... trying to squeeze out that last few percentage points of herd 'immunity' feels more like political brinkmanship than a calculated public health policy. I think they need to let this go.
I wonder how I would react to such a situation - very high mortality virus. I know I'm now much more hesitant to accept government proclamations about closures and safety than I was two years ago. Two years ago I would confidently go along with almost any restrictions for a virus with a 10%+ mortality rate. I went along with a lot of restrictions for a virus with an under 2% rate.
That's probably the thing that bothers me the most about the bulk of our government's reactions - a whole lot of burned goodwill that we may need in the future.
I believe the lab leak story and have never believed the fringe theory that it was released by China on purpose. But in my nightmares, the obvious tactic is to release something that’s bad but not so bad that we don’t get lockdown fatigue, and when we do, release the real virus.
If you know that the same government officials who lied to you about Wuhan (fairly high probability) and gain of function (high probability) is telling you that you should take a vaccine, I can certainly understand a certain level of hesitancy. That they also pushed low probability/high cost solutions - significant lockdowns, masking outdoors by yourself, etc., didn't help to rebuild confidence. Most people have no idea how vaccines work, or how to determine efficacy and side effects. Going by the basic rule "stop believing people who lie to you" is generally a good way to make decisions.
Low-probability/high-cost solutions being pushed by governments for lack of anything else they could really do (aside from the travel bans and quarantining they refused to consider) has definitely burned a lot of good will.
I know Bret Weinstein has been making that point consistently (although he's taken a lot of flack over being an ivermectin hawk.) Insisting that two-year-olds need to wear masks in kindergarten is pretty cult-like behaviour.
So, yeah, I wouldn't entirely blame the average citizen for being hesitant when it comes to vaccine compliance just based on how trustworthy and lacking in appropriate humility the people pushing it are. But the leadership of dissident political parties should be smart and educated enough to know that the vaccines themselves are probably pretty safe- there's no shortage of other valid criticisms to make when it came to pandemic response.
I was in the army and received the smallpox vaccine in 2003, prior to deploying to Afghanistan. It is (or was) a pretty nasty vaccine.
It is not administered with a hypodermic needle but rather with a weird small fork-looking needle that is used to jab the skin multiple times.
I don't remember if I got sick. But the vaccination does cause a lesion (one pock, I guess) at the site of administration. The pock gets quite bad and then scabs over, but remains quite bad underneath. It is not a very photogenic process.
Sometimes I feel special, but no. I was in a regular light infantry unit. I believe that it was standard for both military personnel and civilian contractors who deployed as part of the GWOT.
In the immediate post 9/11 period, when a manufactured hyper fatal smallpox was being hypothesized, there was a push to mandate smallpox vax for all hospital workers. Que surprise, a lot of hospital staff, to include nurses, are older with borderline metabolic disease. A lawsuit was successful in preventing the mandate except for military personnel.
That sounds very like the tuberculosis jab that I, and every other British youth, received at school. You can always tell British children of a certain age due to the single pock mark on their left shoulder. It hurt like heck for a few days, then oozed brown pus, then scabbed up before leaving a scar.
In "wow, vaccines aren't as effective as we all think": it [BCG] prevents about 20% from getting infected and among those who do get infected, it protects half from developing disease
It took us three days to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, one highly effective and almost always with no more than minor side effects. IANAM, but I don't see any reason why the same technology wouldn't work for smallpox. And we now have the facilities to mass produce vaccines using that technology on a global scale.
We still have the FDA, so we might not be *allowed* to. OTOH, maybe the solution to vaccine hesitancy is to officially prohibit the vaccine from being used except for high military and government officials, then nod and wink as Pfizer et all leak a few billion doses to a black market already highly optimized for distributing illegal-but-highly-demanded pharmaceuticals :-)
I mean, we have two existing vaccines for small pox, which are effective at preventing severe disease if administered even up to a week after infection. We have two antivirals that have been FDA-approved for smallpox in the last four years.
Smallpox might be worse than COVID if it were to come back, but it's not going to be anything like the ancient menace it was for our ancestors.
An important point about the Spanish flu - most of the deaths caused by the 1918 Spanish flu were actually as a result of bacterial pneumonia. If it had happened just a decade later it would have been significantly less deadly, as bacterial pneumonia is immensely helped by antibiotics.
Also the whole world war thing probably didn't help as far as increased pollution, food rationing, millions of mangled civilians and added stress (excluding those that were actually fighting).
Yes. No-one had globe-spanning empires with regular communication, trade and movement of armies. There was no diaspora of Europeans to other continents that led to regular contact. No trade networks...
Sorry. That might be unduly sarcastic, but whilst the average person may not have travelled as much as today, the post Great War world was still very mobile, and travel was not unusual.
> No mystery why smallpox died out - we killed it.
Well except for some lab samples. And now it's not even relevant - smallpox is literally open source, and there's even even instructions for "compiling" it (paper from a few years ago, about doing it with horsepox).
It would be equally trivial to compile an RNA vaccine using multiple surface proteins, or a deactivated varriant.
Heck, the current vaccine can be mass produced and, in spite of the myths around it, looks to be perfectly safe in large scale trails as recent as the 2010s.
> An envelope fell out of a book containing a note and some weird red stuff; the note said that it was smallpox scabs from a past infection, kept as souvenirs. This sounds like a scene for a horror movie aimed at epidemiologists.
The note is in English and says "scabs from vaccination of W. B. [?] Yarrington's children".
This would strongly suggest that no smallpox is present. You don't vaccinate for smallpox with smallpox.
If it says vaccination then it probably is that. But it's funny that for centuries humans did effectively vaccinate for smallpox with smallpox (called Variolation) and prior to mid 19th century that would be the most likely way used to protect someone from smallpox. The idea being to take infectious pus from a very mild case and inoculate a small amount of it into the skin of an uninfected person. This would usually lead to them developing a very mild case as well and immunity though it did lead to more severe cases and death in ~1/100 or so in treatments (which is much better 1/3 of cases leading to death in pandemic smallpox). You can read old letters about parents fighting on whether to do it or not (as you might imagine specifically taking an action with such a high risk of a bad outcome is difficult against a future unknown risk).
Starting with a weak strain, then serially passing it from on variolated person to the next (as well as the process for collecting and drying out the pus) probably lead to weaker strains. That plus the very small amount of infectious material used and introducing into the skin (natural cases that start in the lungs as opposed to the skin [both possible] are much more likely to be severe) led to the lower risks then natural infection which would tend to be the more virulent pandemic strains.
Not relevant to ancient plagues, just a modern one.
In a world where a ridiculous number of people refuse vaccination for Covid, perhaps Omicron is good news. That is a variant that is more infectious but less lethal than Delta to search out and variolize unvaccinated persons.
I mean, the evolutionary endpoint of coronaviruses in humans seems to be the common cold. The question is "at what death rate do you start treating COVID like the common cold".
Presumably, you start treating covid like the common cold when its death rate is comparable to that of the common cold. I don't know what that death rate is.
I was listening to https://twitter.com/vaccinepodcast and they described how, shortly after smallpox was wiped out, an archeological team dug up a crypt in England known or strongly suspected to contain victims of smallpox. They took precautions and I'm glad to hear that recovering live virus from these conditions is rare. But I was struck by the idea that there is no possible universe in which the benefits of a single archeological dig outweigh the risk of re-releasing smallpox, even if minuscule.
I mean, surely it depends on HOW miniscule. Smallpox was a global plague, so ANY archeological excavation that might find bodies presumably has a miniscule chance of a viable virus surviving by random chance.
Sure. My understanding is that smallpox won't survive on, say, the outside of a piece of pottery in the dirt. AFAIK most digs don't take the precautions this one did (like wearing masks), which they did because they were opening up a crypt where A) people were known or believed to have died of smallpox; B) a crypt is a reasonable environment for preserving tissue and therefore viruses.
I've become more aware of dust and crap in the past 24 months, but I'm surprised they don't just wear simple masks because they're blowing sand and dirt and dust everywhere.
IIRC, the specific dig was not a discovery dig but a construction dig - they were digging foundations for a new building, discovered the crypt, and then called in the archaeologists to document it before the construction workers could complete their work.
This is absolutely routine procedure in Europe; indeed some construction projects take out insurance against it, as a small percentage of construction projects get hit with enormous bills for major archaeology and long delays while it is being done.
[The worst examples are usually underground metro railways which dig up much more ground than buildings]
The first that comes to mind is finding the Harbour of Eleutherios in Istanbul which delayed the opening of the Marmaray Tunnel by four years. They found multiple complete Byzantine military galleys.
Something I've never understood about smallpox: why were native Americans and Australians affected so badly by it, when it was a relatively minor problem in Europe?
Is it that smallpox had already swept through Europe centuries ago, before recorded history, and wiped out the ~90% of people who weren't especially resistant to it? Or is it something more complicated?
Racial innate immunity is part of it, as is the fact that smallpox still killed a bunch of people in Europe every year (they just weren't all at the same time).
There's also the fact that Native Americans (less so Aboriginal Australians) are badly inbred; all the natives of North and South America descend from approximately 70 people who crossed from Siberia into Alaska. A lack of genetic diversity means parasites (including viruses) can hyperspecialise and get away with it.
There was probably also some cultural unpreparedness, due to lack of experience with dangerous plagues (AIUI they were far less common in the Americas due to lack of cities and less domestic animals).
And of course, it wasn't just smallpox; it was a bunch of things all hitting at the same time.
Another big factor (which I've seen described as *the* factor) was that Europeans enslaved Native Americans. The slaves were overworked, underfed, and lived in crowded conditions. And natives fleeing the Europeans couldn't help but invade whatever places they fled to, causing further war and economic disruption.
My understanding is that the vast majority of deaths (just like the vast majority of Native Americans at the time) were far from European settlements. I doubt slavery contributed to the death toll THAT heavily.
In addition to what Byrel said, there is little evidence of the settlers encountering large native populations. Early explorers document finding them, but by the time the settlers arrived diseases had already taken a massive toll on the continent's population. I don't think slavery is considered a meaningful contribution to the decline of Native American populations, at least in North America.
South & Central America may be a different story. While I have not heard of this hypothesis in my readings, what I described above was not the situation in those places so it would not be an appropriate rebuttal.
Viruses do not spring into existence out of nowhere. They evolve. So before the virus "smallpox" existed, there was probably another virus in Eurasia which had a similar genome, and which was already circulating, but less deadly. So people already had a chance to build immunity against something similar, and this helps against smallpox.
I say "probably" because it's not always like this. For a zoonotic disease that jumps over to humans, this disease has not been circulating in humans before, so no one had the chance to build up immunity. Or a virus could suddenly mutate so heavily that it completely escapes previous immunities, though this seems rare.
Terminology in such cases might be unclear and confusing. We might call both versions of the virus "smallpox", but it helps to think about them as different viruses. Just like the omicron variant right now is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying if it had been the very first variant, hitting a completely unprotected population. Even so, a new version of a virus can be really bad even with partial immunity. (But it's worse without partial immunity.)
Genetic analysis suggests that Smallpox is most closely related to Taterapox (which primarily infects gerbils) and Camelpox. Monkeypox, Horsepox, Rabbitpox, and Cowpox are also fairly closely related but branched off a bit earlier.
Syphilis, which turned up in Europe really soon after the discovery of the Americas (at least the one that stuck, and presumably involved sex), seems to have had the opposite pattern. It was much more devastating in Europe than the Americas. Not as fatal a disease obviously.
Syphilis was devastating in Europe, but do we know how bad it was in the Americas? If it appeared at the same time as smallpox and typhoid, maybe no one noticed?
My understanding is that syphilis is derived from a skin disease among people who don't wear many clothes, but had to scramble to survive in a new niche when transported to a temperate climate. So it was a new disease in ~1500, regardless of whether it came from the Old World or New and could have invaded the New World, even though it had relatives in the tropical New World, just as it had relatives in the tropical Old World. Tungiasis is a clear example of a disease that Europeans brought from the Caribbean to the mainland.
One of the big plagues in the New World was typhus, but the best guess as to its origin is American flying squirrels.
The Columbian Exchange plagues weren't just smallpox. Measles was also a big killer, and there were a bunch of other diseases that also showed up in the Americas right around the same time. Smallpox alone generally killed a bit more of the affected population in the Americas as it has historically in Europe and Asia, but not enormously more.
A number of endemic Eurasian diseases, such as Measles and Chickenpox, and much more deadly if you're first infected as an adult than in childhood, and are contagious enough that when they're endemic, just about everyone gets them in childhood.
And then there's Cocoliztli, which was the big killer in 16th century Mexico, killing something like 90% of the remaining native population (after a wave of smallpox had just killed ~20%) in two waves of disease. Its cause is still an open research question, with the leading candidates being paratyphoid and a native viral hemorrhagic fever.
Measles is now thought to be especially nasty because it interferes with your acquired immunity to other diseases in the way it attacks the immune system.
The book 1491 goes into some detail on this question. The "fresh soil" infection fatality rate for smallpox was about 30% in Europe and Asia, but may have approached 95% in parts of the Americas (it's hard to tell for sure since multiple diseases were introduced at once). Partly there was a lack of survivors (who were therefore immune), but that doesn't explain the whole effect. But never the kind of continent-scouring effects it had in the Americas. The book claims essentially that Americans had immune systems that were less genetically diverse and the most popular phenotypes were particularly vulnerable to smallpox.
(Also, it wasn't a "minor problem" by any stretch; it killed a lot of Europeans!)
The 95% mortality rate estimate cited in 1491 is overall mortality for all the post-contact plagues in Central Mexico, not Smallpox alone. About 20% of the population there died of Smallpox, then 90+% of the survivors died of two waves of something called Cocoliztli, the cause of which is still an open research question.
I think he cited other tribes not in Mexico which saw similar fatality rates (my copy is buried under stuff somewhere so I can't check). As I mentioned, it's hard to say for sure what an individual disease IFR was, but then as now diseases tended to hit in waves so most of the deaths in a short period of time would have been from a single illness.
Yes, that fits with my understanding as well. There was also massive social disruption, both from the plagues themselves and the Conquistadors and their aftermath, which probably also made populations more vulnerable to disease. And on top of everything, there was a "megadrought" affecting southwestern North America (including Mexico) for several decades in the middle of the 16th century.
There's actually a really interesting answer to this question that was discussed in a book called The Ten Thousand Year Explosion. Here's a quick and dirty summary: the development of agriculture in human groups promotes urbanization, because it allows a certain number of people to give up farming or food production more generally and focus on making tools or clothes or jewelry or whatever. Those people then need to trade with the farmers or with each other to acquire food, and so you get trading posts emerge, which then grow into villages and then towns and then eventually cities.
However, until the advent of modern sanitation and waste management practices in the last ~250 years, these cities were virtual death traps due to the prevalence of disease. The result was that there was significant selection pressure among residents of these urban areas for stronger, more reactive immune systems over several thousand years; selective pressure which hunter gatherer groups were never subject to.
This happened to a lesser extent in rural areas, also, because about 7-8,000 years ago, humans began domesticating livestock of various kinds, and inevitably came into contact with those animals' bodily fluids on a pretty regular basis. Herd animals like cows have a somewhat higher disease burden than animals like bears that are asocial, and some of those diseases began opportunistically mutating to begin infecting humans, also. Again, this resulted in selection for more robust immune systems in human groups that had domesticated animals.
When you look at the New World, Central and South Americans had some large urban areas, having been practicing agriculture for quite some time. Not as long as Europeans, though, and they hadn't really domesticated any animals with the exception of some goats in parts of the Andes, so when smallpox shows up, they suffer pretty badly. 50% death rates or higher. Go a little further north, though, to the Great Plains or the American/Canadian Rockies, and people there are pretty much purely hunter gatherers. No meaningful agriculture, no urban areas. 95%+ fatality rate when smallpox shows up. Ditto for Australian aboriginals and the Maori of New Zealand.
Contrast this with India and China, which had agriculture and urban areas for just as long as Europe, so when smallpox shows up, there's a roughly 5-10% population dip in India which is made up within a generation or two, and it's even smaller in China.
Jared Diamond also cites proximity to domesticated animals as a reason for better disease tolerance among Eurasians in GG&S. I'm not sure if it's an original idea or if Diamond got it from someone else. I also don't remember him citing a ton of supporting research (from what I recall, true of lots of his ideas), but it's been a while since I've read it.
The idea that plagues come from livestock made a lot of sense at the time, but genetic sequencing shows that it was mainly wrong. I suppose that leaves room for a more amorphous claim that livestock caused the immune system to generally rev up.
"TB appears to be ancient in humans, smallpox probably came from some East African rodent, while falciparum malaria seems to have derived from a form of malaria carried by gorillas. Measles really does descend from rinderpest, a cattle plague, but then rinderpest (and mumps) probably descend from bat viruses. Domesticated animals do play a role in influenza, along with wild birds. I don’t think we know the origins of pertussis."
Thanks for that! So it seems like animal domestication could still be a primary explanation for some diseases, and a secondary explanation for others, but probably not very good as some grand unifying theory of Eurasian disease tolerance.
The grand unifying theory is just a larger population in Eurasia. You can think of diseases-in-the-population as an evolutionary phenomenon of the population in the same way as genetic mutations or technologies developed.
> ared Diamond considered the disastrous impact of Eurasian and African diseases on the inhabitants of the New World, contrasted with a much smaller impact in the opposite direction, and concluded that a major factor had probably been transmission from domesticated animals. Eurasians domesticated quite a few animals, Amerindians not many – perhaps that was the explanation. In Guns, Germs, and Steel (p 207), he mentions measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, pertussis (whooping cough), and falciparum malaria as likely cases of transmission from domesticated animals.
> We know a lot more about this we did twenty years ago, since we’ve been sequencing the genes of everything in sight – and it appears that Diamond was mistaken about the most important members of that list. TB appears to be ancient in humans, smallpox probably came from some East African rodent, while falciparum malaria seems to have derived from a form of malaria carried by gorillas. Measles really does descend from rinderpest, a cattle plague, but then rinderpest (and mumps) probably descend from bat viruses. Domesticated animals do play a role in influenza, along with wild birds. I don’t think we know the origins of pertussis.
Here's the thing. We don't *intentionally* domesticate rats. But rat exposure is a real consequence of our lifestyle; I'd be more comfortable labeling smallpox-from-rats as "Jared Diamond wins" than "Jared Diamond loses".
In which case we would have narrowed the original list down from measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, pertussis, and malaria to measles, smallpox, influenza, and pertussis.
This is not the most convincing argument against the idea of domesticated animals being a source of passive disease carrying within the population. The GGS argument isn't that people in Europe are constantly getting the flu from their livestock. It's that one of them got the flu from livestock once, and now everyone in Europe has the flu, making them dangerous to American populations that were never exposed.
I was going to say something similar about rats at first, but then I thought that proximity to rodents has more to do with agriculture and sedentary lifestyle than domesticating livestock, per se, though these things are often (but not always) a package.
Jared Diamond made a specific claim, that disease was from large domesticated animals, not available in the New World. This is not at all the claim that disease is from rodents feeding on granaries. The New World had its own granaries and rodents, although I don't know the details of rodents feeding on granaries.
Smallpox is not from a rats, but from gerbils. I don't know the details of which rodents fed on Old World granaries, either, but I think it was more mice and rats, while gerbils were not attracted to human settlement.
Interesting. I guess it would leave room for transmission of parasites, anyway, from livestock to humans, which could have had an effect on immune systems. Hookworms or tapeworms, for example.
One other note, though, from someone who grew up out in the sticks: if you watch livestock like cows or horses out grazing in a pasture or whatever, during the summer time at least, you'll notice their tails are swishing back and forth every few seconds. This is because there are insects crawling all over them, constantly. If you're a farmer who is around these animals all the time, I imagine that your chances of contracting diseases like malaria that are spread by insect vectors probably go up by an order of magnitude.
Anecdata: to this day, I have a funky lookin' scar on my calf from a nasty horsefly bite I got on a neighbor's farm when I was ~5 years old. I recall horsefly bites were a semi-regular occurrence back then, but this one was particularly bad, and I couldn't stop scratching it. We moved away when I was ten, and I don't think I've been bitten by a horsefly in 25 years since then.
Malaria is highly specialized. It cannot infect both humans and cows. It cannot even infect both humans and chimps, but has species specialized to one or the other. It has been suggested to use cattle to dilute the transmission of malaria. Most malarial vectors (eg, Anopheles gambiae) won't bite cows, but if there are enough cows, maybe it would be outcompeted by A. arabiensis, which bites both humans and cows.
Perhaps malaria was a bad example, but my point was that having more animals in your general vicinity is also probably going to mean more insects that like to bite. The implications of this for disease transmission, I can't speak to. Just thought it was worth pointing out.
Not really about ancient plagues, but we already have engineered plagues and Australian rabbits in this thread so what the hell, I'll just continue.
So, there's been a considerable amount of effort going into eradicating those rabbits through biological warfare, and without real success. If actual scientists with government funding and a 100 years of effort failed to wipe out a species from a single continent, isn't it a strong evidence against bioweapons being an X-risk, at least in the near future? One big difference I see is that rabbits breed much faster than humans and so maybe they can outbreed a disease, but I feel like it should be more than offset by hygiene, quarantine and medicine.
To be clear, I'm asking specifically about the risk of wiping out the entire species or at least the civilization, death rates in 10-50% still look possible and of course that'd till be horrible.
I think a clear distinction is that Australian scientists need to design a bioweapon that kills rabbits without killing humans (another mammal), farm animals, etc. which is a significant design restriction.
In the case of an anti-human bioweapon the designers would presumably be far less concerned about collateral damage allowing them far more freedom.
Also we've studied human infections and epidemiology a lot more than anything else which also gives a knowledge edge
That's an interesting point, but I would expect designing a disease targeting a broad range of hosts is actually more challenging, given that most (not all) natural diseases are more or less host specific. Maybe achieving very narrow specificity is hard, but I imagine even wiping out every rodent in Australia would be a feature not a bug.
Bioweapons are not an X-risk. There has never been a pandemic in history that has come close to killing every single person, and in the modern era, even one that kills 10% of the population is probably impossible in developed countries because of advancements in science, technology, and state power.
It would have been much harder for the entire human population to die of a pandemic with the lack of fast transport. Perhaps it happened to some isolated population somewhere.
> even one that kills 10% of the population is probably impossible in developed countries because of advancements in science, technology, and state power.
No, this is definitely achievable for a malicious and creative biologist. I don't think it could reasonably kill >90% though.
Well, that's simply not what the experts in the X-risk area say. E.g. The Precipice gives 1/30 chance of extinction in the next 100 years to "Engineered pandemics".
How well have experts performed in the COVID-19 pandemic? If they can't even things right with a known virus that's been circulating for months, I doubt their guess about bioweapons in the next 100 years is anything better than a monkey throwing darts at a dart board.
Reasonably well, the EA crowd has been warning about a possibility of global pandemic for years before covid and they were among the first to take it seriously.
Besides, I never could understand how from "experts don't know shit on this topic" people derive "but I totally do".
Presumably people feel that experts in, say, a particular kind of catastrophe are always biased in favor of overestimating the chances of that catastrophe in order to increase their status
As I noted below, I think that might include bioweapons other than pathogens, which are not limited in the fashion pathogens are.
(There's also the idea of a pathogen that takes active steps to spread itself e.g. the sci-fi idea of a slug that eats your brain and then puppets your body around for a month or so. A pandemic could very easily wipe out humanity if all the infected people actively attempted to spread it. It's questionable whether that's actually possible, though.)
An airborne HIV (i.e. chronic disease causing death after years) could collapse civilisation.
Wiping out the entire species is not going to happen from a pathogen, though; transmission would break down long before it got humans under minimum viable population, and no reservoir lives everywhere that humans do.
Life 2.0 is definitely an X-risk. We don't have it yet, but e.g. an engineered alga that used less phosphate in its biochemistry, could fix carbon at lower partial pressure than any land plant and wasn't profitably digestible by any natural organism would starve Earth's biosphere and cause a glaciation at the same time.
Not sure whether Toby Ord's 1/30 includes Life 2.0.
Some contrary examples: Dutch elm disease seems to have killed 97%+ of elms in affected regions. A frog plague seems to have killed off a few dozen frog species. Tasmanian devils are almost extinct because of their contagious facial tumor.
If 97% of humans died, this might not be an x-risk, but it would probably end civilization. I don't know why it's so much easier to kill elms and frogs than rabbits, or which one humans are more like.
> know why it's so much easier to kill elms and frogs than rabbits, or which one humans are more like.
Restricted habitats and restricted movement. Humans are adaptable to many environments and many more varied behaviours, and there are surely environments and behaviours in which any given pathogen will spread less easily so some pocket of humans are much more likely to survive.
> And doctors whose knowledge of medicine doesn't begin and end with "look like a creepy bird"
I love that picked a picture that is titled "the doctor's beak of Rome[?]". But to be fair, as the text at the bottom points out ("clothes against the death in Rome"), they also wore protective clothing. Maybe COVID wouldn't have been as bad if a lot of people had chosen to dress like this when going outside.
It's a mask and goggles, and the beak is there because they thought that inhaling sweet smelling herbs would help detoxify the air. It's possible that it just provided a little extra masking, and got the doctors to feel happy about wearing their masks rather than constantly trying to take them off.
Maybe this is because my primary language isn't English and it's mapping funny to English in this occasion, but when I read a virus is worse, my brain first thinks it's stronger because a stronger virus would be a worse thing. I have to stop and think for an instant to realize it's a worse virus (and that's a better thing).
I'm less sure about how worrying or not worrying this might be. A good reference is pre-Columbian America: since there were no close human relatives in the American continent for millions of years, all the pathogens there were poorly adapted, and selection on human immune genes was relaxed, they didn't seem to have much issue, until Eurasian diseases got to them ultra hard (so a disconnect or just some dozens of thousands of years of evolutionary time)
Worth noting that Europeans were substantially more affected by syphilis from the american continent than natives were. I'm not sure that this was a matter of globally worse immune systems; could have just been a combination of universally naive immune systems and no genetic immunity to specific diseases on the other side of the exchange.
Whether syphilis came from the New World was still an open question last time I looked. The timing of the European outbreak suggests it. But there are apparently skeletal remains from earlier that are interpreted as showing evidence of syphilis.
The whole premise is ignorant anyway, resting as it does on the delusion that we are (or could be) seriously different, down at the molecular level where infective invasion and defense happen, from our ancestors 50,000, let alone 5,000 years, ago. We're not. If all you had access to was information on the 50 micron length scale and below, you'd be extremely hard pressed to tell the difference between a sophisticated 21st century journalist tapping out doom pr0n clickbait and a Cro-Magnon grunting[1] tales of boogey-men in the wild woods to his hairy naked children squatting around a fire in a cave.
Viruses and eukaryotes have been slugging it out for 600 million years, and not a lot has changed at the level where the battle is fought since an uneasy truce was called some 7-digit number of years ago (at least). The idea that viruses preserved from 1 million BC are potentially dangerous in a way a brand-spanking-new virus cannot be is goofy. The molecular weapons and defenses are unchanged, over that time span, and so are the potential chinks in the armor, zero-day exploits, et cetera. There's no reason a virus frozen in Antarctica ice for 10,000 years would be any more, or any less, dangerous then one created by an unfortunate mutation 10 minutes ago, and you'd think HIV and SARS-CoV-1 (and -2 to some extent, and for that matter the 1918 flu, the Black Death, practically the entire history of pandemic disease, really) would be pretty obvious illustrations of that fact.
(1) Same reason any disease affects any more vulnerable population badly. The point is not whether new disease can happen -- whether "new" means "brand-spanking new just evolved last week" or "new to you because neither you nor your ancestors have been exposed to it these last 50,000 years" -- but that the risk of "new" from "discovered in 100,000 year old ice" isn't noticeably different than new in the ordinary way. The chances that a 100,000 year old virus or bacteria has some *completely novel* way of attacking human cells, a microscopic defense against which is utterly impossible, are pretty much zero, because, as I said, this war has already been going on for half a billion years.
(2) In what sense "badly," anyway? There are still Native Americans around. They weren't wiped out. Certainly a pandemic can make serious dents in your population, and they regularly do. They regularly will in the future, too. But one assumes the doom pr0n aspect here that freaks people out is the possibility of *extinction*, not just "a lot of people get sick and die", because the risk of the latter has been with us from Eden and will never go away even if we are very careful to never dig up frozen mammoths carelessly. And since smallpox didn't wipe out the Amerinds, it's not a useful example of the hypothetical scenario at issue, indeed it is a good counter-example -- an illustration of the fact that even diseases to which a population has not been exposed in 50,000 years are not capable of wiping everyone out.
1) No one is claiming that an ancient plague will attack in a "completely novel" way (in fact, just the opposite). But you said there's no reason to think it would be any more dangerous for the tens of millennia that have passed, which seems to be contradicted by the evidence of Native Americans, who became more vulnerable after a shorter period of separation and therefore evolution "away" from the disease.
2) You're just making a completely false dichotomy here. Things can be extremely concerning without wiping out the human race, I should think quite obviously. Some estimates put Native American smallpox mortality as high as 90%. If 90% of the population died of an ancient plague, I'd consider that well worthy of "doom porn".
I embarrassed myself in a movie theater by saying something out loud (much shorted than your essay) about it when an an ancient virus was supposed to be especially scary. I think it was the X files movie.
Talking of archaeologists digging bodies up, a relevant clip from the 2001/02 season of Time Team, where they find a possible lead coffin burial and discuss the precautions needed - 26.26 on the Youtube video:
Out of curiosity, is there a way to estimate how deadly smallpox would be if it were around today? Presumably modern treatments (separate from vaccination) would reduce fatality, even if only a little.
Well, first of all, vaccination IS a treatment for smallpox. Smallpox has a non-contagious asymptomatic incubation period of about a week, and a vaccination in that time frame massively reduces the risk of severe disease and death.
Secondly, in 2018 the FDA approved one antiviral drug (Tecovirimat) for smallpox, and just this year another (Brincidofovir). These would probably help a lot, though I haven't done a deep dive into the evidence (which seems to be based on monkey models infected with smallpox, so is presumably a bit shaky anyhow.)
Third, we're just much much better at life support than we used to be. Ventilation, infection control, fluid management. We don't really know exactly how people died from smallpox usually; it was eradicated before most of our modern labwork capabilities, but involved multiple organ failure. One popular theory is that it was immune-mediated; if so, likely one of our many many immuno-suppressants would be a helpful late-stage therapy (like dexamethasone was for COVID.)
"...why would a flu evolve into an inferior flu? Sure, it might evolve into a less deadly flu because it's perfectly happy being more infectious but less deadly."
One thought that just struck me: maybe it makes it easier for the virus to "hide" in the general population, so to speak? IE, a really infectious flu triggers major public health responses from humans to fight it--ya know....like we did back in 1919--but if transmission from person to person seems a little more random, those precautions aren't taken and the virus' odds of hanging around over time (albeit in smaller numbers) actually go up?
I have no training or knowledge in this area at all, and this is probably 100% wrong.
Gretas scare the shits out of me (or they would, if I were . So the author writes: "many, many more people are not scared enough than are already “too scared.” In fact, I don’t even understand what “too scared” would mean."
You don't understand!?! Let me explain: 1 .The panic about DDT in pinguins let to a ban of DDT. Let to millions of extra-malaria deads, cuz other stuff was less efficient, not safer, more expensive. 2. The panic of the population bomb let to China's enforced one-child-terror. With women forced to abortion even weeks before birth. But, yeah, it is only about fetus (and their parents), and millions are statistics only (French diplomat, not Stalin). 3. Panic about CO2 let to "BIO-ethanol" - food converted to fuel, thus less food to eat, higher prices, hungry kids. 4. Panic about nuclear-power lead to premature closure of Germany's plants, more use of coal, esp. dirty brown-coal. By worsening air quality coal-stations kill millions (Fukushima: 2) - but QALY is again just "statistics". 5. Panic about GM-food keeps the world mal- and undernourished for much longer than needed (and forces me to buy the worse conventional stuff, not even a choice!). 6. Panic about warming forces ever stricter building codes, that make it ever harder to afford a home, even a rented one. 7. Panic about Thalidomide (at least sth. to be scared about!) lets the FDA stick to to its restrictive course - how many lifes and QALY lost, Scott and "It's a war"-Zvi may count. - Even if there really is sth. to be scared about: IT IS OFTEN FATAL TO SCARE TOO MUCH. And intentionally working up a panic, can EASILY lead to extremely wrong and harmful decisions. - Maybe it is all for the good if the NYT goes over-the top. May make more people feel suspicious about Gretas and NYT. But then: I find that stuff in school books ("Warmer climate - spread of Anopheles to the north - more Malaria in Europe"). And kids in UK cry after "lectures" by Extinction-rebellion. Hey, I believed in Armageddon (before Gorbachev) and then in DOOM, Club-of-Rome style. As a teen.
I don't disagree about any of those specific examples of kneejerk overreactions, but I'm not clear on how this works out as a criticism of Scott's position?
Do comments have to be criticism of Scott's position? :) (and are they?) - But, all right, I guess my critic is: This NY-article is so deeply and massively flawed - and so not-aware-of-it even in the "new" version - and sad-to-say so "mainstream", that IF Scott writes about it at all, he should not just nit-pick about one of the minor not-so-often-made claims, but about the whole piece. Because: people suffer now and will suffer more. As in: They die. And - to take the alarmist argument: we are not yet in the fat end of what possible further catastrophic consequences may follow from half-wit measures to "stop" climate-change. (Obviously, I am a lukewarmer. I really do see real risk in further climate-change, but for now I see a lot more risk in many proposed counter-measures ending up mostly as growth-killers. And growth saves us. And is the only hope for a future stable climate.) So: "smallpox from permafrost is probably not a big issue" - seems to me not the proper reaction in a blog of ACX-stature. "écrasez l'infâme"
I suppose I don't disagree with much of that- terrifying Gens X through Z into giving up on reproduction has to qualify as something like civilisational suicide- although for various reasons I'm a little more skeptical about "make GDP go up" being either sustainable or the panacea for all our social ills. But that's a separate discussion.
Plural. As shorthand for deeply ignorant climate-alarmists on a mission to make people panic. Greta Thunberg: I want you to panic. - NYT: I don’t even understand what “too scared” would mean
People convinced Doom is inescapable don't take measures to escape it any more than people convinced Doom is a non-issue. That's another "too scared" problem.
The first thing I question is that really a couple of degrees warming will cause so much suffering? It might disrupt the climate in many places but I don't buy the doom.
I lived in the Soviet Union (in Latvia) and when it fell apart, the whole economy was disrupted. People were too enthusiastic to throw away every Soviet supply chain that times were really bad for a decade until we created new companies, new supply chains etc. But we managed to do it and gained democracy, free speech, access to the world etc. Even though mistakes were made, it was worth it. Most people who lived through this period would gladly make this “mistake” again.
In the same way I feel that we would gladly accept that increase of temperature means that the farmers need to implement new technologies, new supply chains etc., and it may be hard, instead of suffering under undemocratic dictatorship that "greens" are trying to impose on us to eliminate some but not all undesirable changes.
I am not against reducing pollution, switching to greener technologies etc. And certainly some government regulation is required. But it will gradually happen anyway with good economy. Extinction Rebellion if they get their way, is really what I am most afraid of.
1. Can you point to any place where DDT stopped being used to control malaria? My understanding is that Silent Spring led to a ban on the use of DDT in places where malaria had already been eliminated, but its use in malaria-prone areas never stopped until local mosquitos developed resistance.
2. This seems like a real example of the problem you're talking about, though I'm not clear on any direct connection between the "population bomb" worries and China's policy.
3. Has bioethanol been grown anywhere that has been relevant for hunger? My understanding is that bioethanol has been pretty big in North America and Europe, but these continents have not in recent decades been particularly relevant to child hunger. (The issue has rather been about distribution networks in Africa and Asia, not global supply of food.)
4. The post-Fukushima shutdown of nuclear was a huge tragedy.
5. How much effect has anti-GMO had on world nutrition? Don't they use plenty of GMOs in the places where nutrition is an issue?
6. Some stricter building codes are in fact worsening housing prices, but some are also saving lots of lives in modern earthquakes. I'd want a deeper accounting to understand which are which, and whether the net effect has been positive or negative.
7. Agreed that the FDA has gotten too conservative.
1. Yes, afaik DDT continued to be used in South Asia, at least. I remember Africa as the place with markedly reduced use - what kind of "ban" if the stuff was used same as before? Turning to wikipedia: esp. India kept production relatively high; elsewhere the reduced production let to higher costs and much less use. The outspoken critics may be wrong or right. (wikip quotes rather weak "arguments" against them) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Criticism_of_restrictions_on_DDT_use
2. so what made the Chinese do it? Horoscopes? C'mon.
3. The world is flat, markets for everything, certainly for food. If the US et al. produces less corn for human consumption (or less of any food),
this leads directly to higher world prices of food. Mexicans (and south of M.) do care about the price of corn.
5. We will never know. We don't use any in the EU. (also: see 3.). Not much in Africa either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organism#Crops Golden rice only started 2018 (how many years late - feels it was with us half my life, and GMO-scare was with us always - me boomer, ok).
6. No earthquakes here. Not even tornadoes - but indeed: growth leads to wealth leads to safer housing - and due to this and many other reasons all connected with growth to a fall in deaths-by-natural-disaster - no matter what climate.
7. At least in the US some wonder if the FDA could be tiny bit more helpful. German media see it as a given that all this must take exactly as much time as it takes the EMA and RKI. (maybe I should write "mostly" - but then I actually do follow our media and never saw a take as Zvi: "Omicron is coming. Boosters won’t be updated in time.
Paxlovid remains illegal.")
Scaring too much and panic is a thing. A very dangerous one. Or do the sequels state somewhere: "Yeah, go and panic. No such thing as 'being scared too much'"?
Here's a friendly heads up from a medievalist that a whole lot of historians of medicine no longer think the Black Death was bubonic plague. They think it was almost certainly a human-to-human airborne disease of an unknown type. It spread lightning-fast (much more like covid than plague), turned up in places where there weren't rats (like Iceland and remote mountain villages), and killed very fast (1-2 days versus bubonic plague's 7-10 days). So -- basically imagine Covid, only with pustules and bloody vomit rather than coughing, and with a 30-50% death rate. Since we don't know what the disease was, it's unknown whether good sanitation would have made a difference.
I thought they'd proved that the pathogen was Yersinia Pestis. They've been digging up grave sites and writing papers claiming Plague was the cause since 2010. I think the hypothesis changed to pneumonic plague over bubonic plague because of the speed of transmission and the other points you've made.
What is the origin of the Plague (either bubonic or pneumonic) hypothesis anyway? I suspect if the original hypothesis was based on questionable logic, then subsequent confirmation of it is biased.
The Plague hypothesis got going in the 19th century, and the main reason for it was the pustules/boils. Lots of medieval descriptions of the Black Death include reference to boils, and so 19th-century scholars assumed it must have been yersinia pestis, because Plague was such "a thing" in their day anyway. The convenient thing is that lots of pre-19th-century people also had yersinia pestis, so there were of course lots of bodies with yp to confirm this. The re-evaluation of the Plague hypothesis started when enough historians realized that (1) the BD spread too quickly for any form of yersinia pestis and (2) the time from infection to death was too quick. (Yersinia pestis consistently takes 7-10 days, but what freaked out the medieval chroniclers is that healthy young people could wake up in the morning feeling fine, be breaking out in boils by noon, and be dead the next day.) Then scholars finally started asking "what other deadly diseases can cause pustules under the right conditions?" -- and it turns out that the grocery list is quite long.
The pneumonic variant kills people in much less time than that - I think often in less than 2 days. Then again, the formation of pustules isn't one of the symptoms, so the YP hypothesis remains a questionable one.
Hm! That's interesting - I didn't know the pneumonic version had that short a turnaround. I don't recall it being talked about in the lit. Maybe there's a more recent discussion; it's been about 4 years since I actually looked at the research!
👻👻👻👻Oooooooh👻👻👻 I am the Spooky ghost of Arthur Jensen doomed to haunted the lead contaminated streets of Baltimore for all time. I bring the curse of multiple sclerosis to all those who misrepresent heritability or believe Linda Gottfriedson’s genocidal horseshit.
Racists, worshippers of psychometric g, repent! It's just myelin and glial cells. White people are just sort of mediocre dickheads who poisoned themselves. 👻👻👻Ooooooooh👻👻👻
Wait, blog.jaibot is back up? wasnt this an old blog of yours that SSC linked to occasionaly but all the links were dead? Or am I just confusing it with your livejournal :)
(Which I know can still be dug up through wayback machine, but it’s a bit of a hassle)
I also raised an eyebrow at this point in The Uninhabitable Earth. It is absolutely possible for ancient organisms to survive freezing, but the risk from that seems quite small relative to the apparent and pretty quantifiable risk of continual habitat destruction causing previously wilderness-only diseases to run around in human-occupied areas.
Add to that increased mosquito habitat and you have plenty to worry about from warming areas.
Speaking of "Arctic ice" one of the most profound movies about the struggle for survival is "March of the Penguins" (2005), a documentary about the annual 70-mile walk Emperor penguins take in order to find a mate and raise a baby chick in the harsh climate of Antarctica.
The Life Lesson from this movie, which applies to all of us and all of this DOOMism, is:
"Life is a beautiful struggle—splendor and sadness co-exist for us all."
>Animal diseases can't trivially become contagious among humans. Sometimes an animal disease jumps from beast to man, like COVID or HIV, but these are rare and epochal events. Usually they happen when the disease is very common in some population of animals that lives very close to humans for a long time. It’s not “one guy digs up a reindeer and then boom”.
Or uh, you know when Ecohealth and Daszek have been doing some fishy shit along with the Chinese military.
I think part of the answer to the flu thing is the “novelty is severity” argument that Zeynep has been highlighting. A lot of why diseases become less severe over time is not that they evolve that way, but instead that we get exposed to more and more similar diseases and our immune systems get trained. So the 1918 flu was a completely novel disease jumping from animals into people, but since then we have been exposed to lots of similar flu viruses with similar structures and therefore have some level of defence against them.
Evolution rests on current conditions. One way diseases evolve is within individuals. It's great for a disease to spread fast, but then you also get evolution among the populations of virus in a single human.
So you may start off with a flu strain optimised to spread... but then it survives in some immune compromised or weakened individuals for months or perhaps even years and the strain that it becomes while doing so is highly adapted for evading a (weakened) human immune system over long time periods.
because viruses don't have a single environment to adapt to, it's not a matter of a single search space, rather they have different parts of their lifecycle and adapting really well to one part may make them worse in another.
Then throw in some recombination .
Viral recombination occurs when viruses of two different parent strains coinfect the same host cell and interact during replication to generate virus progeny that have some genes from both parents.
Something like 10% of people have an active influenza infection at any given time, it's just that mostly they sit quietly in your nasal cavity avoiding the interest of the immune system. Sometimes these stealthy versions swap genes with nastier versions of influenza to produce interesting combinations.
Not that important but that piece is from New York Magazine, not the New Yorker
Really? There's a New York Times, a New York Magazine, and a New Yorker magazine? I don't even feel bad about this one, at this point it's on them.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there's also a New York Times Magazine (part of the Sunday edition of the New York Times).
Nominative determinism strikes again!
While we're at it, it's worth noting there was a New-York Magazine. Someone should start up a magazine just called York, to confuse people who hear about the new York magazine.
Also a culinary or horticulture magazine New York Thymes.
And a motivational magazine New York Thumos
Infocom, the makers of the Zork adventure game, at one point had a newsletter called "The New Zork Times", but changed it presumably in response to legal threats.
Indeed! And I think technically I shouldn't have capitlized "Magazine," I think it's just a magazine called "New York." So I only led you to introduce a new error into this blog.
Not to mention the New York Times Magazine, the Sunday insert of that newspaper; I believe the magazine has a separate editorial staff from the newspaper, although the Sunday Times itself is not independent of the daily newspaper. (As opposed to the Sunday Times of London, which is separate from the Times, although both are owned by Murdoch's News Corp. ANYHOO.)
New York Magazine was founded in 1968, and by the early 1970s had become so trendy in the region that The New Yorker was taking out full-page ads [in, like, the New York Times, so there ya go] plugging their latest cool stories, with the tag line "Yes, The New Yorker."
http://alphabettenthletter.blogspot.com/2020/10/alphabets-new-yorker-advertisements.html
(Those are from 1985; my memory has that slogan as being from 1973, when I moved to the NY area, but, you know, memory...)
Oh yeah, if I'd actually READ my link I would have seen the mention of bringing back the old slogan.
And the New York Review of Books not to be confused with the New York Times Book Review.
And really none of them are especially New at this point. They should drop the act.
Presumably they're waiting for Newfoundland and New Mexico to crack and change their names first, for fairness' sake. Or maybe nobody in the New World (the World formerly known as New?) is willing to first until those smug Newcastle jerks finally admit that their castle is now actually quite old.
My local national park, which is 1000 years old and mostly grassland, is called the New Forest.
Quora has already considered the question of the oldest thing called "New" in the world.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-oldest-actively-used-thing-with-New-in-the-name-Things-can-be-locations-products-ideologies-whatever-As-long-as-they-have-New-or-a-variant-thereof-in-the-name-and-are-in-fact-old%E2%80%94but-have-kept-the-name
In English, it's probably New College, Oxford (1379 AD)
In any language, it's probably Carthage (9th Century BC)
When I commented above I didn’t realise I had a contender for the crown. The New Forest in southern England is 300 years older than New College: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Forest.
Prague has an Old New Synagogue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_New_Synagogue
That's endearingly unworldly of you, Scott.
Time to start a New Yorkest magazine.
Archrival to the New Lancastrian magazine.
If it was from the New Yorker he would still be reading it.
This was my exact thought. I even hesitated to click because "Oh. no. New Yorker! This is gonna be huge and I have to go out in an hour." I clicked anyway and was like "Oh, it's New York magazine. That's not so bad."
Not to be confused with the New York Review of Books, nor the New York Times Book Review
"They didn’t find any live viruses, but there were able to recover a few shreds of useful DNA."
You're wrong. Live Spanish flu was indeed revived and used to infect a bunch of monkeys (and kill them).https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05495
And yes, this was crazy and stupid.
But we DO need a time machine!
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/the-best-time-traveling-movie-of
It's as if the movie Jurassic Park (1993) didn't even exist!
That paper seems to suggest they synthesized it, not that they found live virus:
“Genes of the 1918 virus were constructed from published sequences…”
The full genome was published in 2005. I supposed I didn't consider it important what exact tools scientists used to revive the virus when the outcome was fully functional Spanish flu was "revived/resurrected/restored" whatever. The tools to do that are far more widespread and available than they were in 2007
I mean…yeah…it doesn’t make it any less insane. More, maybe.
This supports the "scientists are a big concern" for the source of revived pandemics case. The genomes of a lot of viruses are freely available (or easily accessed behind a paywall). Also, the cost of doing some of this research might seem like a non-trivial factor, but there's a surprisingly large do-it-yourself community in the molecular genetics space. And the cost of lyophilized DNA is cheap. As in, you can buy a few hundred base pairs for less than a hundred dollars, cheap.
The idea that the risk here might end up being mainly man-made is endorsed by Kevin Esvelt of gene drives fame. You can listen to him talking with Julia Galef here http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/261-dangerous-biological-research-is-it-worth-it-kevin-esvelt/ or read his op-ed https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/07/manipulating-viruses-risking-pandemics-is-too-dangerous-its-time-stop/
This is broader than just permafrost diseases, he argues we should monitor areas with risk of natural spillovers, but avoid sampling viruses that might be dangerous or predicting how dangerous they'd be, since it gives a laundry list of dangerous bioweapons to anyone that might access it and want to use it.
It's somewhat analogous to how Toby Ord argued that any technology that can manipulate asteroids is more likely to be used by a human to get us a strike on purpose than to prevent the Earth getting hit by an asteroid, but of course we know the base rate per century of asteroid strikes on Earth is tiny, while for natural pandemics it's not so tiny (not that this avoids the risk being mainly manmade)
Hmm, I would think it's much easier for a human to manipulate an asteroid that is currently on course for Earth to not hit it than for a human to manipulate an asteroid that is currently not on course for Earth to hit it. Only a tiny fraction of trajectories should hit Earth any time soon, so getting something that is currently on one of those trajectories off of it seems much easier than getting something currently not on it onto it.
As of two days ago, CNEOS is aware of 2238 potentially hazardous asteroids, up 4 from the start of the month; 160 of them are over a kilometer in size. https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/totals.html
Beyond looking things up, why care about rates? There only needs to be one asteroid that can be diverted towards Earth for this to be something worth caring about.
Modest proposal that this kind of research should probably only be permitted off-world, in facilities with infrequent and neurotically safetyist contact with the rest of civilization. Viral outbreaks on Enceladus or Charon (how appropriate) are going to be much easier to contain than, for a completely hypothetical example, in Wuhan.
Once we have colonies offworld, with enough extra capacity to spend time researching topics that aren't directly related to either to survival or economic activity, I would suspect there would be enough regular transit of people and material that accidental transmission would be entirely possible.
I think it means that you're less likely to randomly stumble across the virus in permafrost and get infected by it.
yes, but thats cold comfort when some of our best minds are already scouring the permafrost so they can resurrect the worst plagues and then publishing handy recipes on exactly how to do it in ways that dont require any original pathogenic material at all, and only required a few thousand dollars in 2007 and basicn biology know how.
also. These were not random corpses stumbled upon. They were recorded deaths of spanish flu that were known to be buried in permafrost. The proper response to discovering corpses in a particular area harbor spanish flu is napalm.
Sure, idiot microbiologists are a risk to civilisation. Scott's point is that global warming doesn't increase this risk significantly.
No, it sure doesn't. Thawing out the permafrost will prevent microbiologists from having such a source to access. We need to increase carbon emissions as a pandemic prevention measure.
I agree, the risk isn't from ancient diseases that have never seen humans so much as modern diseases that have previous experience working in the human environment.
Nobody would expect a random bacterium to survive in the Dead Sea. There's a reason extremophiles exist, and it's because they've adapted to living in a difficult environment. The same is the case with any species that has been developing independently for millennia. Much easier to not just infect one person (that's the 'easy' part) but maintain effective person-to-person transmission if you've been working that angle for a long time.
Or if you were engineered in a lab to be really good at it. Problem with being engineered in a lab is that then you might have really strong binding to, say, a human receptor you need access to in order to enter into cells, but then suck at getting into other species where you can hide out between outbreaks. You'd be more deadly, sure, but you'd need to quickly broaden your scope beyond humans in order to make sure you can perpetuate in non-human species. Moving between species, when both have immune systems that are trying to target you, is a tough game.
There's a lot that goes into making a really strong pandemic pathogen. Every tall kid thinks they can play in the NBA, but it takes a lot of special training to make it happen. Talent alone isn't enough. Same for potential pathogens.
I feel like this is meme-driven research, though actually the desire to maximize attention existed before memes and that's clickbait works.
No, I'm not thinking of any particular meme but maybe people will turn something up.
This just seems like people who want to do the most dramatic possible research.
I'd rather if they spent their time climbing stacked up milk crates.
Why are microbiologists seemingly more reckless than other scientists? Who in their right mind would publish the genome of the Spanish flu? You don't see physicists publishing blueprints for atomic bombs.
But you see a lot of computer malware circulating.
Active malware copies are more comparable to individual viruses (as they indeed used to be called), whereas manuals on how to effectively make your own aren't much widespread. Which makes sense, even the blackest hat hacker won't get much value out of openly leaking his secrets for free.
There are malware programming kits out there, but their efficiency isn't great, because antivirus/antimalware companies will update their products very quickly and render the required vulnerabilities unusable.
Our immune systems cannot be "updated" anywhere as quickly.
Right. To do it efficiently you need to be able to find novel vulnerabilities, and these skills are pretty esoteric.
Well that might be relevant if anyone knew how to create zero-day exploits of the immune system. But viruses don't, having no brains, and it is well beyond *our* knowledge at the moment. Maybe in 100 years or so we will figure out how to do that, and then we'll be in the position of those of us in 1985 who wondered whether Lise Meitner should've just kept her mouth shut in 1938 about the possible explanation for why Otto Hahn saw barium in the neutron-activated decay of uranium.
But physicists do publish the underlying equations for nuclear physics. You're comparing an engineered application of published physics to an actual publication of biological science. The comparator to the nuclear bomb would be the systems used to recreate Spanish Flu, not the scientific data.
Physicists don't usually _have_ blueprints for atomic bombs. The ones that do tend to have gone through enough NDAs, Top Secret clearances and whatnot to know better. Unfortunately the equipment and techniques necessary for sequencing the Spanish flu genome are very similar to those needed for sequencing any other genome and are thus relatively ubiquitous.
Unfortunately this is true - a competent virologist could reproduce a flu virus with a reverse genetics system without too much difficulty or a huge amount of resources. Leaders of that particular field need to be much more transparent about the risks of what they do.
A uranium atomic bomb is pretty easy. (Well you have to have the enriched uranium... that's the hard part.)
This was why I couldn't understand why the Wuhan lab leak theory was dismissed as so much tin foil millinery.
There are really a couple of factors in play there.
1) the PRC is notorious for taking revenge on people who say mean things about them, and they've made it quite clear that they consider that possibility such a "mean thing",
2) For a variety of reasons, loyalty to the West and fear of external threats have become associated with Scott's Red Tribe; thus, mocking this became a signal of membership in the Blue Tribe.
3) The coronavirus gain-of-function experiments which took place in Wuhan were funded by the US. It is plausible that blame for the pandemic can be attributed to a chain of reckless decisions starting in Congress and ending at NIH and Ecohealth. These decision makers still wield influence, and like the PRC leadership they do not stand to benefit from inquiry.
Well, there's this working hypothesis that part of the requirement of being an adult, or a nation of same, is that you (singular or plural) exercise responsibility when it comes to dangerous technology -- and you band together with your like-minded friends and allies to take effective police action against miscreants or idiots who do not -- and that attempting to keep all dangerous technology secret and only in the hands of a select well-chosen super-responsible few is (1) not the way free men want to live, and (2) not effective anyway.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1958/
You can download plans for a fully automatic weapon off the Internet and use a CNC machine to make it. Or if you're a Columbian narco gang you can probably buy surplus Soviet weapons on the international market. A complete amateur (like Tim McVeigh) can buy a ton or two of fertilizer in a feed store and then some motor oil and make a bomb that can take down a building. You can peruse the open chemistry literature and then use a variety of readily available chemicals to synthesize dangerous drugs, powerful explosives, and deadly poisons, and wreak havoc in some neighborhood, or poison a water supply and kill tens of thousands, et cetera. None of this tends to keep us up at night, because we count on almost everybody not wanting to do that kind of thing in the first place, and that the remaining few weirdos will generally be held in approximate check by fear of what the rest of us will do to them if they cut loose. That doesn't reduce the risk to zero, of course, but then life doesn't generally seem to admit of zero risks in any other category anyway.
For that matter, only a n00b would attempt to weaponize flu, even the 1918 version. It's not nearly deadly enough, there's no way to control it or protect your own people against it, and it mutates far too fast (which means it readily *stops* being as bad as you might initially design it to be). The go-to bioweapon of choice has historically been anthrax, which has a mortality when inhaled *even with treatment* of 50-100%, does not spread from person to person (so your own people are safe), and the bacteria of which can be cultured and then the spores readily weaponized (e.g. made highly inhalable) cheaply, and stored almost indefinitely -- no fancy RNA synthesis lab required.
To be fair, physicists did build a particle collider which a decent portion of people considered to be an X risk.
Did anyone with any practical knowledge consider that to be the case though? After all, there's some people who think racial equality is an X risk, but we don't tend to listen to them!
It's pretty well-known how to make a gun-type device (like Little Boy), actually, although building an implosion-type device (like Trinity or Fat Man) is much more involved.
The bottleneck on terrorist nukes is that you need >50 kg of ~90% U-235 in order to make a Little Boy, which if you're trying to make it from scratch means >6 tonnes of unenriched uranium, a giant facility full of centrifuges (presumably sucking down something close to a megawatt), and months to years of uninterrupted operation. That's a rather-large undertaking for a non-state actor when it also has to be kept secret (otherwise everyone drops everything to stop them, because terrorist nukes are bad).
I think you likely would if that weren't specifically illegal and likely to get the CIA banging on your door.
Yeah, this is a risk I am surprised the author didn't discuss. Someone finds a few useful shreds of DNA, stitches together a new nightmare virus etc. This would be a lot more 2020ish.
> Here is a great article about a guy who digs up ancient Indian burial grounds, searching for samples of especially severe flus. If only we had some sort of cultural folk memory that warned people against doing that kind of thing!
Hah, I'm actually not sure if this is a reference to anything in particular. Is it referencing Pet Sematary or something?
There's a cultural trope in the US that Native American burial grounds are cursed.
Okay, wasn't sure if it was more specific than that.
Also, just the taboo against going around digging up graves in general.
Manchester (the one in England, not New Hampshire) discovered an old graveyard when building a new light rail line through the city centre a few years ago. Getting the permissions to exhume the bodies and rebury them took two years and actually doing the work also bloated the budget by about a hundred million dollars.
If it had been anything other than a public sector public budget project with an essentially unlimited budget, it would have killed the entire project.
.... and this is a graveyard that was closed in the 1840s, so it's not like these people had living relatives who remembered them.
I should add: these things have been very well-managed and the other lines haven't gone over budget and have regularly come in ahead of deadline; this wasn't an example of public sector bloat, just discovering something that was a dramatically bigger problem than expected.
The only detailed written records were from the 1890s when the road was built over the graveyard, and they only mentioned 120 graves; when excavated, there turned out to be a second complete layer of graves under the recorded layer, resulting in a much bigger and deeper excavation, finding 280 graves eventually. That's not something you can plan for in advance.
Of course, this doesn't compare to some of the archaeological finds for underground railways in places like Rome and Istanbul - finding the Eleutherios port with the only ever complete quinquereme is possibly the biggest one; that delayed the Marmaray project by at least four years.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IndianBurialGround
> But I haven't the proper experts address this properly
I think there's a typo in this sentence.
Also several typos in the quote from the magazine, but that might be on them, I didn't check.
Seconding this.
The quote typos appear to be a copy/paste error from a footnote/sidebar? I genuinely don't understand the NYMag site formatting.
Thank you, I fixed my own typo, but I can't find the ones in the magazine quote, what are you referring to?
> In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million
Something weird is going on here. Seems like the sentence about the frozen women is out of place?
They're also inconsistent about whether they use em dashes or hyphens to separate clauses; the first two paragraphs use em dashes, the last one uses hyphens.
And I thought there was at least one more, but I can no longer find it.
That is one remarkably active cadaver.
Yeah, there's cause for optimism. We're not adapted to weird ancient diseases, but they're also not adapted to us.
Some of the most fascinating scientific questions relate to aliens. (By "aliens" I mean any lifeform dropped into a totally new environment, not grays with anal probes.) You'd think the alien would die in the strange environment - often this is true! But sometimes aliens have a competitive advantage.
Rabbits in England are preyed upon by a host of animals, which holds their fitness in check. But when they were brought to Australia, a place with few or no natural predators, they took over. Their alienness gave them an advantage. The country now has a hundred and fifty million feral rabbits - about eight times more rabbits than people.
Agricultural crops often do best far away from their native land, where pests and pathogens are adapted to them. New-world maize and cocoa are among the biggest crops in Africa. Conversely, most coffee is grown in South America. Sometimes being far from home is a good thing.
The diseases spread by the Columbian expansion were famously very bad for the Native Americans, and that's definitely the alien advantage in action. So why won't permafrost viruses do the same to us?
Probably because "alien advantage" falls off quickly. You can't be too ill-suited for your environment or your fitness goes away. So there's a weird curve in play: "close" diseases (that we come into contact with regularly) normally aren't that bad: our bodies have built up defenses to them. "Far" diseases (such as the smallpox that wiped out the Taino) are worse. But VERY far diseases hit a species barrier and become harmless, unless they can cross over.
The pyramids are more recent than the peopling of the Americas; nothing buried within the last 15,000 years is "very far" in that system.
Although anything buried 15,000 years ago would be doing well to have any living cells. Those things require upkeep after all.
I seem to recall that DNA breaks down too far to be useful after 10,000 years? I'm not sure if that's a rule of thumb or a solid barrier, as I've heard both. Either way, it makes extremely old viable cells pretty unlikely.
Some bacteria and yeasts and molds and amoebas and such can get into a dormant state where the cell survives for a long time (sometimes by a bunch of cells banding together and creating a dried out spore or something). But I think viruses need to be in a host cell to survive long, and host cells from mammals usually can't get into this kind of dormant state.
Oddly though rabbits are alien to Britain as well (I've heard both Arabian and Iberian origins suggested). They were introduced by the Romans. So presumably the difference here was that for whatever reason, perhaps creatures already adapted to hunt the native hare, was that Britain had predators that could hunt rabbits effectively (fox, stoat, larger birds of prey, wolves) whereas for some reason the Australian predators couldn't. Which is odd: there's small marsupials that approximately fill the rabbit niche in the ecosystem, so what happened to their predators? Is this a case of human intervention disrupting the predators?
Human intervention certainly did disrupt the predators (Australia was near the end of the March of Man), and marsupials are not really on par with placentals anyway, but there's presumably more going on than that considering foxes and dogs have also been introduced to Australia (the latter prior to white settlement; dingoes are feral dogs).
How bad the old world diseases were for the Native Americans is actually extremely controversial. From what data we actually have, smallpox fatality rates amongst Native Americans appears to have only been about 30% - which is the same as it was in Europeans.
Moreover, recent mRNA studies suggest that the total decline in population was probably only about 50% from peak to trough, which isn't too surprising, given that the 90%+ estimates were always wildly implausible based on archaeological evidence.
Supposing smallpox reappeared, how long would we need to be able to restart vaccine production? I assume patents on smallpox vaccines are now expired and anyone who wants to can produce a vaccine, but I'm also sure it would take some time.
> However, Smallpox vaccination is a bit rough (live virus), if you think anti-vaxers are bad with Covid, wait until they get their hands on some documented actual injuries. I guess no one has been working on how to make a gentler smallpox vaccine for a while.
Any reason we couldn't do mRNA vaccine? Live smallpox virus vaccines seem terrifying.
> if you think anti-vaxers are bad with Covid, wait until they get their hands on some documented actual injuries.
Eh, actually, about them - maybe they'd react better to them. They seem to trust in obsolete vaccine tech more than modern. At least they claim so.
> Live smallpox virus vaccines seem terrifying.
The traditional way to do smallpox vaccines is to deliberately infect the patient with _cowpox_, not with smallpox. You get the same immunity, but without the permanent disfigurement and high chance of death.
You're thinking variolation, which preceded the vaccination by decades.
I'm old enough to have had the smallpox vaccine, when I was 5 years old. It was painful, and I had two sites on my arm that developed a minor version of smallpox. The oozing sores healed in about 2 weeks. I suspect that with the anti-vax and the safetyism sentiments today, those vaccinated and recovering would be made to self-isolate for the 2 weeks
> I had two sites on my arm that developed a minor version of smallpox.
Not really. There are several related viruses. The vaccine has never contained smallpox. It was originally cowpox, and is now a virus specific to smallpox vaccine the origins of which are not understood.
"...is now a virus specific to smallpox vaccine the origins of which are not understood."
...How on earth can the origins of a virus used to provide a vaccine 'not be understood'? Did some anonymous researcher mail a hundred vials of an unknown substance to the CDC and told them to grow more in chicken eggs?
I'm not an expert on vaccine development, but I suspect if push came to shove we'd develop something gentler fairly quickly. (Probably in 2-3 months, then wait another year for the FDA and state-level logistics to stop tripping up over their shoelaces.)
On a bit of a tangent, anti-vaxxing always strikes me as a strange political tactic to employ if you want to criticise the establishment- there's plenty of ways that public health authorities have been glaringly dishonest and incompetent without trying to assault their fortress at the strongest point. The lab leak hypothesis has the preponderance of evidence in it's favour at this point, for example, and the Wuhan lab was probably getting funding for gain-of-function research from the FDA. "The US government indirectly helped to engineer a plague that killed millions worldwide" is probably a stronger criticism than "newer vaccines are slightly more likely to cause allergic reactions and are not a panacea, also big pharma greedy".
I'd also say, for the sake of completeness, that if smallpox actually made a serious comeback I'd be 100% in favour of vaccine mandates. A disease that could wipe out 10-20% of the species, often children, really would legitimate the hammer of state power coming down in full force.
I might even have supported vaccine mandates if we'd actually had vaccines for COVID from day one- I was certainly in favour of travel bans and mandatory quarantines for anyone getting off the plane from Wuhan just after the outbreak, whereas at the time even the obviously symptomatic were being allowed to go to conferences in Vegas, which was pretty sociopathic.
But I think that window has passed for COVID, and between the imperfect effectiveness of vaccines themselves, the endless treadmill of new strains emerging, the reasonably high level of voluntary compliance and the generally low mortality rate of the disease for most age groups... trying to squeeze out that last few percentage points of herd 'immunity' feels more like political brinkmanship than a calculated public health policy. I think they need to let this go.
I wonder how I would react to such a situation - very high mortality virus. I know I'm now much more hesitant to accept government proclamations about closures and safety than I was two years ago. Two years ago I would confidently go along with almost any restrictions for a virus with a 10%+ mortality rate. I went along with a lot of restrictions for a virus with an under 2% rate.
That's probably the thing that bothers me the most about the bulk of our government's reactions - a whole lot of burned goodwill that we may need in the future.
I believe the lab leak story and have never believed the fringe theory that it was released by China on purpose. But in my nightmares, the obvious tactic is to release something that’s bad but not so bad that we don’t get lockdown fatigue, and when we do, release the real virus.
If you know that the same government officials who lied to you about Wuhan (fairly high probability) and gain of function (high probability) is telling you that you should take a vaccine, I can certainly understand a certain level of hesitancy. That they also pushed low probability/high cost solutions - significant lockdowns, masking outdoors by yourself, etc., didn't help to rebuild confidence. Most people have no idea how vaccines work, or how to determine efficacy and side effects. Going by the basic rule "stop believing people who lie to you" is generally a good way to make decisions.
Low-probability/high-cost solutions being pushed by governments for lack of anything else they could really do (aside from the travel bans and quarantining they refused to consider) has definitely burned a lot of good will.
I know Bret Weinstein has been making that point consistently (although he's taken a lot of flack over being an ivermectin hawk.) Insisting that two-year-olds need to wear masks in kindergarten is pretty cult-like behaviour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuIkXzIUV4I
So, yeah, I wouldn't entirely blame the average citizen for being hesitant when it comes to vaccine compliance just based on how trustworthy and lacking in appropriate humility the people pushing it are. But the leadership of dissident political parties should be smart and educated enough to know that the vaccines themselves are probably pretty safe- there's no shortage of other valid criticisms to make when it came to pandemic response.
I was in the army and received the smallpox vaccine in 2003, prior to deploying to Afghanistan. It is (or was) a pretty nasty vaccine.
It is not administered with a hypodermic needle but rather with a weird small fork-looking needle that is used to jab the skin multiple times.
I don't remember if I got sick. But the vaccination does cause a lesion (one pock, I guess) at the site of administration. The pock gets quite bad and then scabs over, but remains quite bad underneath. It is not a very photogenic process.
Sometimes I feel special, but no. I was in a regular light infantry unit. I believe that it was standard for both military personnel and civilian contractors who deployed as part of the GWOT.
In the immediate post 9/11 period, when a manufactured hyper fatal smallpox was being hypothesized, there was a push to mandate smallpox vax for all hospital workers. Que surprise, a lot of hospital staff, to include nurses, are older with borderline metabolic disease. A lawsuit was successful in preventing the mandate except for military personnel.
That sounds very like the tuberculosis jab that I, and every other British youth, received at school. You can always tell British children of a certain age due to the single pock mark on their left shoulder. It hurt like heck for a few days, then oozed brown pus, then scabbed up before leaving a scar.
Still, better than TB.
BCG is the name of the vaccine, and I also have the same scar.
In "wow, vaccines aren't as effective as we all think": it [BCG] prevents about 20% from getting infected and among those who do get infected, it protects half from developing disease
That's 60% prevention; could be much worse.
Relevant cartoon link: https://ifunny.co/picture/whats-that-mark-on-your-arm-mama-i-my-smallpox-RG2DlkYE8
https://ifunny.co/picture/whats-that-mark-on-your-arm-mama-i-my-smallpox-RG2DlkYE8
It took us three days to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, one highly effective and almost always with no more than minor side effects. IANAM, but I don't see any reason why the same technology wouldn't work for smallpox. And we now have the facilities to mass produce vaccines using that technology on a global scale.
We still have the FDA, so we might not be *allowed* to. OTOH, maybe the solution to vaccine hesitancy is to officially prohibit the vaccine from being used except for high military and government officials, then nod and wink as Pfizer et all leak a few billion doses to a black market already highly optimized for distributing illegal-but-highly-demanded pharmaceuticals :-)
I mean, we have two existing vaccines for small pox, which are effective at preventing severe disease if administered even up to a week after infection. We have two antivirals that have been FDA-approved for smallpox in the last four years.
Smallpox might be worse than COVID if it were to come back, but it's not going to be anything like the ancient menace it was for our ancestors.
An important point about the Spanish flu - most of the deaths caused by the 1918 Spanish flu were actually as a result of bacterial pneumonia. If it had happened just a decade later it would have been significantly less deadly, as bacterial pneumonia is immensely helped by antibiotics.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/bacterial-pneumonia-caused-most-deaths-1918-influenza-pandemic
Also the whole world war thing probably didn't help as far as increased pollution, food rationing, millions of mangled civilians and added stress (excluding those that were actually fighting).
Yes. No-one had globe-spanning empires with regular communication, trade and movement of armies. There was no diaspora of Europeans to other continents that led to regular contact. No trade networks...
Sorry. That might be unduly sarcastic, but whilst the average person may not have travelled as much as today, the post Great War world was still very mobile, and travel was not unusual.
> No mystery why smallpox died out - we killed it.
Well except for some lab samples. And now it's not even relevant - smallpox is literally open source, and there's even even instructions for "compiling" it (paper from a few years ago, about doing it with horsepox).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/L22579.1
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0188453&type=printable
I'm not sure if current situation qualifies to call it truly dead.
It would be equally trivial to compile an RNA vaccine using multiple surface proteins, or a deactivated varriant.
Heck, the current vaccine can be mass produced and, in spite of the myths around it, looks to be perfectly safe in large scale trails as recent as the 2010s.
I should note the ", current" one is just a slight variation on a vaccine that was used when the disease still existed.
And anti vaxing wouldn't be an issue for a significant amount of time given the disease's profile.
> An envelope fell out of a book containing a note and some weird red stuff; the note said that it was smallpox scabs from a past infection, kept as souvenirs. This sounds like a scene for a horror movie aimed at epidemiologists.
The note is in English and says "scabs from vaccination of W. B. [?] Yarrington's children".
This would strongly suggest that no smallpox is present. You don't vaccinate for smallpox with smallpox.
Probably scabs from the one blister each child got after the vaccination. Like saving their first tooth.
If it says vaccination then it probably is that. But it's funny that for centuries humans did effectively vaccinate for smallpox with smallpox (called Variolation) and prior to mid 19th century that would be the most likely way used to protect someone from smallpox. The idea being to take infectious pus from a very mild case and inoculate a small amount of it into the skin of an uninfected person. This would usually lead to them developing a very mild case as well and immunity though it did lead to more severe cases and death in ~1/100 or so in treatments (which is much better 1/3 of cases leading to death in pandemic smallpox). You can read old letters about parents fighting on whether to do it or not (as you might imagine specifically taking an action with such a high risk of a bad outcome is difficult against a future unknown risk).
Starting with a weak strain, then serially passing it from on variolated person to the next (as well as the process for collecting and drying out the pus) probably lead to weaker strains. That plus the very small amount of infectious material used and introducing into the skin (natural cases that start in the lungs as opposed to the skin [both possible] are much more likely to be severe) led to the lower risks then natural infection which would tend to be the more virulent pandemic strains.
Not relevant to ancient plagues, just a modern one.
In a world where a ridiculous number of people refuse vaccination for Covid, perhaps Omicron is good news. That is a variant that is more infectious but less lethal than Delta to search out and variolize unvaccinated persons.
Just a thought.
I mean, the evolutionary endpoint of coronaviruses in humans seems to be the common cold. The question is "at what death rate do you start treating COVID like the common cold".
Presumably, you start treating covid like the common cold when its death rate is comparable to that of the common cold. I don't know what that death rate is.
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/112920/will-the-coronavirus-evolve-to-be-less-deadly
I was listening to https://twitter.com/vaccinepodcast and they described how, shortly after smallpox was wiped out, an archeological team dug up a crypt in England known or strongly suspected to contain victims of smallpox. They took precautions and I'm glad to hear that recovering live virus from these conditions is rare. But I was struck by the idea that there is no possible universe in which the benefits of a single archeological dig outweigh the risk of re-releasing smallpox, even if minuscule.
Also, the most recent episode of rationally speaking (http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/261-dangerous-biological-research-is-it-worth-it-kevin-esvelt/) seems to conclude similarly to what you conclude here: Scientists looking for risks may cause the very problems they are trying to prevent.
What about to recover the Holy Grail? Or the Ark of the Covenant?
I mean, surely it depends on HOW miniscule. Smallpox was a global plague, so ANY archeological excavation that might find bodies presumably has a miniscule chance of a viable virus surviving by random chance.
Sure. My understanding is that smallpox won't survive on, say, the outside of a piece of pottery in the dirt. AFAIK most digs don't take the precautions this one did (like wearing masks), which they did because they were opening up a crypt where A) people were known or believed to have died of smallpox; B) a crypt is a reasonable environment for preserving tissue and therefore viruses.
I've become more aware of dust and crap in the past 24 months, but I'm surprised they don't just wear simple masks because they're blowing sand and dirt and dust everywhere.
IIRC, the specific dig was not a discovery dig but a construction dig - they were digging foundations for a new building, discovered the crypt, and then called in the archaeologists to document it before the construction workers could complete their work.
This is absolutely routine procedure in Europe; indeed some construction projects take out insurance against it, as a small percentage of construction projects get hit with enormous bills for major archaeology and long delays while it is being done.
[The worst examples are usually underground metro railways which dig up much more ground than buildings]
The first that comes to mind is finding the Harbour of Eleutherios in Istanbul which delayed the opening of the Marmaray Tunnel by four years. They found multiple complete Byzantine military galleys.
And then there's the David Drake thing where you go back in time and bring modern bird flu to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Something I've never understood about smallpox: why were native Americans and Australians affected so badly by it, when it was a relatively minor problem in Europe?
Is it that smallpox had already swept through Europe centuries ago, before recorded history, and wiped out the ~90% of people who weren't especially resistant to it? Or is it something more complicated?
Yes. Smallpox was an immense scourge throughout the Old World, in recorded history as well.
Racial innate immunity is part of it, as is the fact that smallpox still killed a bunch of people in Europe every year (they just weren't all at the same time).
There's also the fact that Native Americans (less so Aboriginal Australians) are badly inbred; all the natives of North and South America descend from approximately 70 people who crossed from Siberia into Alaska. A lack of genetic diversity means parasites (including viruses) can hyperspecialise and get away with it.
There was probably also some cultural unpreparedness, due to lack of experience with dangerous plagues (AIUI they were far less common in the Americas due to lack of cities and less domestic animals).
And of course, it wasn't just smallpox; it was a bunch of things all hitting at the same time.
Another big factor (which I've seen described as *the* factor) was that Europeans enslaved Native Americans. The slaves were overworked, underfed, and lived in crowded conditions. And natives fleeing the Europeans couldn't help but invade whatever places they fled to, causing further war and economic disruption.
My understanding is that the vast majority of deaths (just like the vast majority of Native Americans at the time) were far from European settlements. I doubt slavery contributed to the death toll THAT heavily.
In addition to what Byrel said, there is little evidence of the settlers encountering large native populations. Early explorers document finding them, but by the time the settlers arrived diseases had already taken a massive toll on the continent's population. I don't think slavery is considered a meaningful contribution to the decline of Native American populations, at least in North America.
South & Central America may be a different story. While I have not heard of this hypothesis in my readings, what I described above was not the situation in those places so it would not be an appropriate rebuttal.
Viruses do not spring into existence out of nowhere. They evolve. So before the virus "smallpox" existed, there was probably another virus in Eurasia which had a similar genome, and which was already circulating, but less deadly. So people already had a chance to build immunity against something similar, and this helps against smallpox.
I say "probably" because it's not always like this. For a zoonotic disease that jumps over to humans, this disease has not been circulating in humans before, so no one had the chance to build up immunity. Or a virus could suddenly mutate so heavily that it completely escapes previous immunities, though this seems rare.
Terminology in such cases might be unclear and confusing. We might call both versions of the virus "smallpox", but it helps to think about them as different viruses. Just like the omicron variant right now is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying if it had been the very first variant, hitting a completely unprotected population. Even so, a new version of a virus can be really bad even with partial immunity. (But it's worse without partial immunity.)
Well cowpox also existed in Europe suggesting smallpox was part of a family of existing diseases.
Genetic analysis suggests that Smallpox is most closely related to Taterapox (which primarily infects gerbils) and Camelpox. Monkeypox, Horsepox, Rabbitpox, and Cowpox are also fairly closely related but branched off a bit earlier.
Syphilis, which turned up in Europe really soon after the discovery of the Americas (at least the one that stuck, and presumably involved sex), seems to have had the opposite pattern. It was much more devastating in Europe than the Americas. Not as fatal a disease obviously.
Syphilis was devastating in Europe, but do we know how bad it was in the Americas? If it appeared at the same time as smallpox and typhoid, maybe no one noticed?
My understanding is that syphilis is derived from a skin disease among people who don't wear many clothes, but had to scramble to survive in a new niche when transported to a temperate climate. So it was a new disease in ~1500, regardless of whether it came from the Old World or New and could have invaded the New World, even though it had relatives in the tropical New World, just as it had relatives in the tropical Old World. Tungiasis is a clear example of a disease that Europeans brought from the Caribbean to the mainland.
One of the big plagues in the New World was typhus, but the best guess as to its origin is American flying squirrels.
The Columbian Exchange plagues weren't just smallpox. Measles was also a big killer, and there were a bunch of other diseases that also showed up in the Americas right around the same time. Smallpox alone generally killed a bit more of the affected population in the Americas as it has historically in Europe and Asia, but not enormously more.
A number of endemic Eurasian diseases, such as Measles and Chickenpox, and much more deadly if you're first infected as an adult than in childhood, and are contagious enough that when they're endemic, just about everyone gets them in childhood.
And then there's Cocoliztli, which was the big killer in 16th century Mexico, killing something like 90% of the remaining native population (after a wave of smallpox had just killed ~20%) in two waves of disease. Its cause is still an open research question, with the leading candidates being paratyphoid and a native viral hemorrhagic fever.
Measles is now thought to be especially nasty because it interferes with your acquired immunity to other diseases in the way it attacks the immune system.
The book 1491 goes into some detail on this question. The "fresh soil" infection fatality rate for smallpox was about 30% in Europe and Asia, but may have approached 95% in parts of the Americas (it's hard to tell for sure since multiple diseases were introduced at once). Partly there was a lack of survivors (who were therefore immune), but that doesn't explain the whole effect. But never the kind of continent-scouring effects it had in the Americas. The book claims essentially that Americans had immune systems that were less genetically diverse and the most popular phenotypes were particularly vulnerable to smallpox.
(Also, it wasn't a "minor problem" by any stretch; it killed a lot of Europeans!)
The 95% mortality rate estimate cited in 1491 is overall mortality for all the post-contact plagues in Central Mexico, not Smallpox alone. About 20% of the population there died of Smallpox, then 90+% of the survivors died of two waves of something called Cocoliztli, the cause of which is still an open research question.
I think he cited other tribes not in Mexico which saw similar fatality rates (my copy is buried under stuff somewhere so I can't check). As I mentioned, it's hard to say for sure what an individual disease IFR was, but then as now diseases tended to hit in waves so most of the deaths in a short period of time would have been from a single illness.
I had understood the problem to be multiple fresh-soil epidemics in rapid succession when people were still weakened from the previous one.
Yes, that fits with my understanding as well. There was also massive social disruption, both from the plagues themselves and the Conquistadors and their aftermath, which probably also made populations more vulnerable to disease. And on top of everything, there was a "megadrought" affecting southwestern North America (including Mexico) for several decades in the middle of the 16th century.
There's actually a really interesting answer to this question that was discussed in a book called The Ten Thousand Year Explosion. Here's a quick and dirty summary: the development of agriculture in human groups promotes urbanization, because it allows a certain number of people to give up farming or food production more generally and focus on making tools or clothes or jewelry or whatever. Those people then need to trade with the farmers or with each other to acquire food, and so you get trading posts emerge, which then grow into villages and then towns and then eventually cities.
However, until the advent of modern sanitation and waste management practices in the last ~250 years, these cities were virtual death traps due to the prevalence of disease. The result was that there was significant selection pressure among residents of these urban areas for stronger, more reactive immune systems over several thousand years; selective pressure which hunter gatherer groups were never subject to.
This happened to a lesser extent in rural areas, also, because about 7-8,000 years ago, humans began domesticating livestock of various kinds, and inevitably came into contact with those animals' bodily fluids on a pretty regular basis. Herd animals like cows have a somewhat higher disease burden than animals like bears that are asocial, and some of those diseases began opportunistically mutating to begin infecting humans, also. Again, this resulted in selection for more robust immune systems in human groups that had domesticated animals.
When you look at the New World, Central and South Americans had some large urban areas, having been practicing agriculture for quite some time. Not as long as Europeans, though, and they hadn't really domesticated any animals with the exception of some goats in parts of the Andes, so when smallpox shows up, they suffer pretty badly. 50% death rates or higher. Go a little further north, though, to the Great Plains or the American/Canadian Rockies, and people there are pretty much purely hunter gatherers. No meaningful agriculture, no urban areas. 95%+ fatality rate when smallpox shows up. Ditto for Australian aboriginals and the Maori of New Zealand.
Contrast this with India and China, which had agriculture and urban areas for just as long as Europe, so when smallpox shows up, there's a roughly 5-10% population dip in India which is made up within a generation or two, and it's even smaller in China.
Jared Diamond also cites proximity to domesticated animals as a reason for better disease tolerance among Eurasians in GG&S. I'm not sure if it's an original idea or if Diamond got it from someone else. I also don't remember him citing a ton of supporting research (from what I recall, true of lots of his ideas), but it's been a while since I've read it.
The idea that plagues come from livestock made a lot of sense at the time, but genetic sequencing shows that it was mainly wrong. I suppose that leaves room for a more amorphous claim that livestock caused the immune system to generally rev up.
"TB appears to be ancient in humans, smallpox probably came from some East African rodent, while falciparum malaria seems to have derived from a form of malaria carried by gorillas. Measles really does descend from rinderpest, a cattle plague, but then rinderpest (and mumps) probably descend from bat viruses. Domesticated animals do play a role in influenza, along with wild birds. I don’t think we know the origins of pertussis."
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/domesticated-animals-and-human-disease/
Thanks for that! So it seems like animal domestication could still be a primary explanation for some diseases, and a secondary explanation for others, but probably not very good as some grand unifying theory of Eurasian disease tolerance.
The grand unifying theory is just a larger population in Eurasia. You can think of diseases-in-the-population as an evolutionary phenomenon of the population in the same way as genetic mutations or technologies developed.
More context from the link:
> ared Diamond considered the disastrous impact of Eurasian and African diseases on the inhabitants of the New World, contrasted with a much smaller impact in the opposite direction, and concluded that a major factor had probably been transmission from domesticated animals. Eurasians domesticated quite a few animals, Amerindians not many – perhaps that was the explanation. In Guns, Germs, and Steel (p 207), he mentions measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, pertussis (whooping cough), and falciparum malaria as likely cases of transmission from domesticated animals.
> We know a lot more about this we did twenty years ago, since we’ve been sequencing the genes of everything in sight – and it appears that Diamond was mistaken about the most important members of that list. TB appears to be ancient in humans, smallpox probably came from some East African rodent, while falciparum malaria seems to have derived from a form of malaria carried by gorillas. Measles really does descend from rinderpest, a cattle plague, but then rinderpest (and mumps) probably descend from bat viruses. Domesticated animals do play a role in influenza, along with wild birds. I don’t think we know the origins of pertussis.
Here's the thing. We don't *intentionally* domesticate rats. But rat exposure is a real consequence of our lifestyle; I'd be more comfortable labeling smallpox-from-rats as "Jared Diamond wins" than "Jared Diamond loses".
In which case we would have narrowed the original list down from measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, pertussis, and malaria to measles, smallpox, influenza, and pertussis.
This is not the most convincing argument against the idea of domesticated animals being a source of passive disease carrying within the population. The GGS argument isn't that people in Europe are constantly getting the flu from their livestock. It's that one of them got the flu from livestock once, and now everyone in Europe has the flu, making them dangerous to American populations that were never exposed.
I was going to say something similar about rats at first, but then I thought that proximity to rodents has more to do with agriculture and sedentary lifestyle than domesticating livestock, per se, though these things are often (but not always) a package.
Jared Diamond made a specific claim, that disease was from large domesticated animals, not available in the New World. This is not at all the claim that disease is from rodents feeding on granaries. The New World had its own granaries and rodents, although I don't know the details of rodents feeding on granaries.
Smallpox is not from a rats, but from gerbils. I don't know the details of which rodents fed on Old World granaries, either, but I think it was more mice and rats, while gerbils were not attracted to human settlement.
Interesting. I guess it would leave room for transmission of parasites, anyway, from livestock to humans, which could have had an effect on immune systems. Hookworms or tapeworms, for example.
One other note, though, from someone who grew up out in the sticks: if you watch livestock like cows or horses out grazing in a pasture or whatever, during the summer time at least, you'll notice their tails are swishing back and forth every few seconds. This is because there are insects crawling all over them, constantly. If you're a farmer who is around these animals all the time, I imagine that your chances of contracting diseases like malaria that are spread by insect vectors probably go up by an order of magnitude.
Anecdata: to this day, I have a funky lookin' scar on my calf from a nasty horsefly bite I got on a neighbor's farm when I was ~5 years old. I recall horsefly bites were a semi-regular occurrence back then, but this one was particularly bad, and I couldn't stop scratching it. We moved away when I was ten, and I don't think I've been bitten by a horsefly in 25 years since then.
Malaria is highly specialized. It cannot infect both humans and cows. It cannot even infect both humans and chimps, but has species specialized to one or the other. It has been suggested to use cattle to dilute the transmission of malaria. Most malarial vectors (eg, Anopheles gambiae) won't bite cows, but if there are enough cows, maybe it would be outcompeted by A. arabiensis, which bites both humans and cows.
Perhaps malaria was a bad example, but my point was that having more animals in your general vicinity is also probably going to mean more insects that like to bite. The implications of this for disease transmission, I can't speak to. Just thought it was worth pointing out.
Not really about ancient plagues, but we already have engineered plagues and Australian rabbits in this thread so what the hell, I'll just continue.
So, there's been a considerable amount of effort going into eradicating those rabbits through biological warfare, and without real success. If actual scientists with government funding and a 100 years of effort failed to wipe out a species from a single continent, isn't it a strong evidence against bioweapons being an X-risk, at least in the near future? One big difference I see is that rabbits breed much faster than humans and so maybe they can outbreed a disease, but I feel like it should be more than offset by hygiene, quarantine and medicine.
To be clear, I'm asking specifically about the risk of wiping out the entire species or at least the civilization, death rates in 10-50% still look possible and of course that'd till be horrible.
I think a clear distinction is that Australian scientists need to design a bioweapon that kills rabbits without killing humans (another mammal), farm animals, etc. which is a significant design restriction.
In the case of an anti-human bioweapon the designers would presumably be far less concerned about collateral damage allowing them far more freedom.
Also we've studied human infections and epidemiology a lot more than anything else which also gives a knowledge edge
That's an interesting point, but I would expect designing a disease targeting a broad range of hosts is actually more challenging, given that most (not all) natural diseases are more or less host specific. Maybe achieving very narrow specificity is hard, but I imagine even wiping out every rodent in Australia would be a feature not a bug.
Didn't nature already invent such a bioweapon? 'Round here we call it a bobcat. Just sayin'....
Bioweapons are not an X-risk. There has never been a pandemic in history that has come close to killing every single person, and in the modern era, even one that kills 10% of the population is probably impossible in developed countries because of advancements in science, technology, and state power.
It would have been much harder for the entire human population to die of a pandemic with the lack of fast transport. Perhaps it happened to some isolated population somewhere.
There are probably still some pockets isolated enough that they can repopulate even if the rest of humanity is wiped out.
I'm not sure if want to scale up the 30-50% mortality rates of ancient and medieval plagues that much though...
Can a bioweapon induce sterility? You can infect a population and they recover but it takes them a while to realize the damage is long-term.
> even one that kills 10% of the population is probably impossible in developed countries because of advancements in science, technology, and state power.
No, this is definitely achievable for a malicious and creative biologist. I don't think it could reasonably kill >90% though.
Well, that's simply not what the experts in the X-risk area say. E.g. The Precipice gives 1/30 chance of extinction in the next 100 years to "Engineered pandemics".
How well have experts performed in the COVID-19 pandemic? If they can't even things right with a known virus that's been circulating for months, I doubt their guess about bioweapons in the next 100 years is anything better than a monkey throwing darts at a dart board.
Reasonably well, the EA crowd has been warning about a possibility of global pandemic for years before covid and they were among the first to take it seriously.
Besides, I never could understand how from "experts don't know shit on this topic" people derive "but I totally do".
Presumably people feel that experts in, say, a particular kind of catastrophe are always biased in favor of overestimating the chances of that catastrophe in order to increase their status
The Precipice covered all kinds of X-risk, not just bioweapons. Scott reviewed it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/
AFAIK Ord isn't an expert in biotech specifically.
X-risk evaluation is anyway mix of writing SF and predicting far future, was quite speculative (which may be still useful!)
As I noted below, I think that might include bioweapons other than pathogens, which are not limited in the fashion pathogens are.
(There's also the idea of a pathogen that takes active steps to spread itself e.g. the sci-fi idea of a slug that eats your brain and then puppets your body around for a month or so. A pandemic could very easily wipe out humanity if all the infected people actively attempted to spread it. It's questionable whether that's actually possible, though.)
ecosystem-destroyers (e.g Behemoth from the Starfish books) could be very bad
From what remember something leading to collapse of civilization is enough to be X-risk and say 90% death rate should be enough for that
An airborne HIV (i.e. chronic disease causing death after years) could collapse civilisation.
Wiping out the entire species is not going to happen from a pathogen, though; transmission would break down long before it got humans under minimum viable population, and no reservoir lives everywhere that humans do.
Life 2.0 is definitely an X-risk. We don't have it yet, but e.g. an engineered alga that used less phosphate in its biochemistry, could fix carbon at lower partial pressure than any land plant and wasn't profitably digestible by any natural organism would starve Earth's biosphere and cause a glaciation at the same time.
Not sure whether Toby Ord's 1/30 includes Life 2.0.
Some contrary examples: Dutch elm disease seems to have killed 97%+ of elms in affected regions. A frog plague seems to have killed off a few dozen frog species. Tasmanian devils are almost extinct because of their contagious facial tumor.
If 97% of humans died, this might not be an x-risk, but it would probably end civilization. I don't know why it's so much easier to kill elms and frogs than rabbits, or which one humans are more like.
> know why it's so much easier to kill elms and frogs than rabbits, or which one humans are more like.
Restricted habitats and restricted movement. Humans are adaptable to many environments and many more varied behaviours, and there are surely environments and behaviours in which any given pathogen will spread less easily so some pocket of humans are much more likely to survive.
> And doctors whose knowledge of medicine doesn't begin and end with "look like a creepy bird"
I love that picked a picture that is titled "the doctor's beak of Rome[?]". But to be fair, as the text at the bottom points out ("clothes against the death in Rome"), they also wore protective clothing. Maybe COVID wouldn't have been as bad if a lot of people had chosen to dress like this when going outside.
It's a mask and goggles, and the beak is there because they thought that inhaling sweet smelling herbs would help detoxify the air. It's possible that it just provided a little extra masking, and got the doctors to feel happy about wearing their masks rather than constantly trying to take them off.
The physical size of the beak would keep people away so they don't get hit with it.
Maybe this is because my primary language isn't English and it's mapping funny to English in this occasion, but when I read a virus is worse, my brain first thinks it's stronger because a stronger virus would be a worse thing. I have to stop and think for an instant to realize it's a worse virus (and that's a better thing).
I think some native English speakers would read it that way too.
As with everything, the question is "worse for whom?" Worse for the virus's own propagation. Better for exposed humans.
I'm less sure about how worrying or not worrying this might be. A good reference is pre-Columbian America: since there were no close human relatives in the American continent for millions of years, all the pathogens there were poorly adapted, and selection on human immune genes was relaxed, they didn't seem to have much issue, until Eurasian diseases got to them ultra hard (so a disconnect or just some dozens of thousands of years of evolutionary time)
FWIW (this doesn't speak to virulence in particular) using reconstructions of ancient adenoviruses is deemed a promising approach to get gene theraphy that isn't rejected by the immune system, as in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211124715007597?via%3Dihub
Worth noting that Europeans were substantially more affected by syphilis from the american continent than natives were. I'm not sure that this was a matter of globally worse immune systems; could have just been a combination of universally naive immune systems and no genetic immunity to specific diseases on the other side of the exchange.
Whether syphilis came from the New World was still an open question last time I looked. The timing of the European outbreak suggests it. But there are apparently skeletal remains from earlier that are interpreted as showing evidence of syphilis.
"millions of years"
Can DNA really survive this long?
That's a good point; looking it up, it seems like it survives maybe around a million years at most.
Yes. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555
The whole premise is ignorant anyway, resting as it does on the delusion that we are (or could be) seriously different, down at the molecular level where infective invasion and defense happen, from our ancestors 50,000, let alone 5,000 years, ago. We're not. If all you had access to was information on the 50 micron length scale and below, you'd be extremely hard pressed to tell the difference between a sophisticated 21st century journalist tapping out doom pr0n clickbait and a Cro-Magnon grunting[1] tales of boogey-men in the wild woods to his hairy naked children squatting around a fire in a cave.
Viruses and eukaryotes have been slugging it out for 600 million years, and not a lot has changed at the level where the battle is fought since an uneasy truce was called some 7-digit number of years ago (at least). The idea that viruses preserved from 1 million BC are potentially dangerous in a way a brand-spanking-new virus cannot be is goofy. The molecular weapons and defenses are unchanged, over that time span, and so are the potential chinks in the armor, zero-day exploits, et cetera. There's no reason a virus frozen in Antarctica ice for 10,000 years would be any more, or any less, dangerous then one created by an unfortunate mutation 10 minutes ago, and you'd think HIV and SARS-CoV-1 (and -2 to some extent, and for that matter the 1918 flu, the Black Death, practically the entire history of pandemic disease, really) would be pretty obvious illustrations of that fact.
[1] Cave-man always grunt when they talk, dunno why. Why not squeak in falsetto or click like Bushmen?
Then why did smallpox affect native Americans so badly?
(1) Same reason any disease affects any more vulnerable population badly. The point is not whether new disease can happen -- whether "new" means "brand-spanking new just evolved last week" or "new to you because neither you nor your ancestors have been exposed to it these last 50,000 years" -- but that the risk of "new" from "discovered in 100,000 year old ice" isn't noticeably different than new in the ordinary way. The chances that a 100,000 year old virus or bacteria has some *completely novel* way of attacking human cells, a microscopic defense against which is utterly impossible, are pretty much zero, because, as I said, this war has already been going on for half a billion years.
(2) In what sense "badly," anyway? There are still Native Americans around. They weren't wiped out. Certainly a pandemic can make serious dents in your population, and they regularly do. They regularly will in the future, too. But one assumes the doom pr0n aspect here that freaks people out is the possibility of *extinction*, not just "a lot of people get sick and die", because the risk of the latter has been with us from Eden and will never go away even if we are very careful to never dig up frozen mammoths carelessly. And since smallpox didn't wipe out the Amerinds, it's not a useful example of the hypothetical scenario at issue, indeed it is a good counter-example -- an illustration of the fact that even diseases to which a population has not been exposed in 50,000 years are not capable of wiping everyone out.
> (2) In what sense "badly," anyway? There are still Native Americans around.
In the sense that smallpox (and other plagues) caused 80-90% death rate and collapse of societies?
1) No one is claiming that an ancient plague will attack in a "completely novel" way (in fact, just the opposite). But you said there's no reason to think it would be any more dangerous for the tens of millennia that have passed, which seems to be contradicted by the evidence of Native Americans, who became more vulnerable after a shorter period of separation and therefore evolution "away" from the disease.
2) You're just making a completely false dichotomy here. Things can be extremely concerning without wiping out the human race, I should think quite obviously. Some estimates put Native American smallpox mortality as high as 90%. If 90% of the population died of an ancient plague, I'd consider that well worthy of "doom porn".
Just a note about smallpox - the US maintains a supply of vaccine sufficient for every American.
https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/bioterrorism-response-planning/public-health/vaccination-strategies.html
I embarrassed myself in a movie theater by saying something out loud (much shorted than your essay) about it when an an ancient virus was supposed to be especially scary. I think it was the X files movie.
A lot of horror is about fear of the past.
Talking of archaeologists digging bodies up, a relevant clip from the 2001/02 season of Time Team, where they find a possible lead coffin burial and discuss the precautions needed - 26.26 on the Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC76jhsoB58&list=PLWy0vReBtl9OFJpPftCA9wYzxIXk7j_IU&index=14
Copyright blocked here in Oz.
Out of curiosity, is there a way to estimate how deadly smallpox would be if it were around today? Presumably modern treatments (separate from vaccination) would reduce fatality, even if only a little.
Well, first of all, vaccination IS a treatment for smallpox. Smallpox has a non-contagious asymptomatic incubation period of about a week, and a vaccination in that time frame massively reduces the risk of severe disease and death.
Secondly, in 2018 the FDA approved one antiviral drug (Tecovirimat) for smallpox, and just this year another (Brincidofovir). These would probably help a lot, though I haven't done a deep dive into the evidence (which seems to be based on monkey models infected with smallpox, so is presumably a bit shaky anyhow.)
Third, we're just much much better at life support than we used to be. Ventilation, infection control, fluid management. We don't really know exactly how people died from smallpox usually; it was eradicated before most of our modern labwork capabilities, but involved multiple organ failure. One popular theory is that it was immune-mediated; if so, likely one of our many many immuno-suppressants would be a helpful late-stage therapy (like dexamethasone was for COVID.)
"the 3.5 million-year-old one that a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity"
At least he has a good origin story once he develops villainous superpowers.
Maxim 14: "Mad Science" means never stopping to ask "What's the worst that could happen?"
"...why would a flu evolve into an inferior flu? Sure, it might evolve into a less deadly flu because it's perfectly happy being more infectious but less deadly."
One thought that just struck me: maybe it makes it easier for the virus to "hide" in the general population, so to speak? IE, a really infectious flu triggers major public health responses from humans to fight it--ya know....like we did back in 1919--but if transmission from person to person seems a little more random, those precautions aren't taken and the virus' odds of hanging around over time (albeit in smaller numbers) actually go up?
I have no training or knowledge in this area at all, and this is probably 100% wrong.
Think of viruses as traveling salesmen.
Has there ever been an interview with the kinds of people who inject ancient bacteria? Why are they doing that?
Apparently to imbibe themselves with the same strengths that allowed the bacteria to survive for so long...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lv0_Cu0FcPA
https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp3gg7/meet-the-scientist-who-injected-himself-with-35-million-year-old-bacteria
Gretas scare the shits out of me (or they would, if I were . So the author writes: "many, many more people are not scared enough than are already “too scared.” In fact, I don’t even understand what “too scared” would mean."
You don't understand!?! Let me explain: 1 .The panic about DDT in pinguins let to a ban of DDT. Let to millions of extra-malaria deads, cuz other stuff was less efficient, not safer, more expensive. 2. The panic of the population bomb let to China's enforced one-child-terror. With women forced to abortion even weeks before birth. But, yeah, it is only about fetus (and their parents), and millions are statistics only (French diplomat, not Stalin). 3. Panic about CO2 let to "BIO-ethanol" - food converted to fuel, thus less food to eat, higher prices, hungry kids. 4. Panic about nuclear-power lead to premature closure of Germany's plants, more use of coal, esp. dirty brown-coal. By worsening air quality coal-stations kill millions (Fukushima: 2) - but QALY is again just "statistics". 5. Panic about GM-food keeps the world mal- and undernourished for much longer than needed (and forces me to buy the worse conventional stuff, not even a choice!). 6. Panic about warming forces ever stricter building codes, that make it ever harder to afford a home, even a rented one. 7. Panic about Thalidomide (at least sth. to be scared about!) lets the FDA stick to to its restrictive course - how many lifes and QALY lost, Scott and "It's a war"-Zvi may count. - Even if there really is sth. to be scared about: IT IS OFTEN FATAL TO SCARE TOO MUCH. And intentionally working up a panic, can EASILY lead to extremely wrong and harmful decisions. - Maybe it is all for the good if the NYT goes over-the top. May make more people feel suspicious about Gretas and NYT. But then: I find that stuff in school books ("Warmer climate - spread of Anopheles to the north - more Malaria in Europe"). And kids in UK cry after "lectures" by Extinction-rebellion. Hey, I believed in Armageddon (before Gorbachev) and then in DOOM, Club-of-Rome style. As a teen.
I don't disagree about any of those specific examples of kneejerk overreactions, but I'm not clear on how this works out as a criticism of Scott's position?
Do comments have to be criticism of Scott's position? :) (and are they?) - But, all right, I guess my critic is: This NY-article is so deeply and massively flawed - and so not-aware-of-it even in the "new" version - and sad-to-say so "mainstream", that IF Scott writes about it at all, he should not just nit-pick about one of the minor not-so-often-made claims, but about the whole piece. Because: people suffer now and will suffer more. As in: They die. And - to take the alarmist argument: we are not yet in the fat end of what possible further catastrophic consequences may follow from half-wit measures to "stop" climate-change. (Obviously, I am a lukewarmer. I really do see real risk in further climate-change, but for now I see a lot more risk in many proposed counter-measures ending up mostly as growth-killers. And growth saves us. And is the only hope for a future stable climate.) So: "smallpox from permafrost is probably not a big issue" - seems to me not the proper reaction in a blog of ACX-stature. "écrasez l'infâme"
I suppose I don't disagree with much of that- terrifying Gens X through Z into giving up on reproduction has to qualify as something like civilisational suicide- although for various reasons I'm a little more skeptical about "make GDP go up" being either sustainable or the panacea for all our social ills. But that's a separate discussion.
I could not agree more to all points you made. Looking forward to meet again ;) - Hopefully, with better grammar on my side. lead led led ...
Is Greta supposed to be the environmentalist Greta, or something else?
Plural. As shorthand for deeply ignorant climate-alarmists on a mission to make people panic. Greta Thunberg: I want you to panic. - NYT: I don’t even understand what “too scared” would mean
People convinced Doom is inescapable don't take measures to escape it any more than people convinced Doom is a non-issue. That's another "too scared" problem.
Also, as a quibble, this isn't the NYT.
The first thing I question is that really a couple of degrees warming will cause so much suffering? It might disrupt the climate in many places but I don't buy the doom.
I lived in the Soviet Union (in Latvia) and when it fell apart, the whole economy was disrupted. People were too enthusiastic to throw away every Soviet supply chain that times were really bad for a decade until we created new companies, new supply chains etc. But we managed to do it and gained democracy, free speech, access to the world etc. Even though mistakes were made, it was worth it. Most people who lived through this period would gladly make this “mistake” again.
In the same way I feel that we would gladly accept that increase of temperature means that the farmers need to implement new technologies, new supply chains etc., and it may be hard, instead of suffering under undemocratic dictatorship that "greens" are trying to impose on us to eliminate some but not all undesirable changes.
I am not against reducing pollution, switching to greener technologies etc. And certainly some government regulation is required. But it will gradually happen anyway with good economy. Extinction Rebellion if they get their way, is really what I am most afraid of.
1. Can you point to any place where DDT stopped being used to control malaria? My understanding is that Silent Spring led to a ban on the use of DDT in places where malaria had already been eliminated, but its use in malaria-prone areas never stopped until local mosquitos developed resistance.
2. This seems like a real example of the problem you're talking about, though I'm not clear on any direct connection between the "population bomb" worries and China's policy.
3. Has bioethanol been grown anywhere that has been relevant for hunger? My understanding is that bioethanol has been pretty big in North America and Europe, but these continents have not in recent decades been particularly relevant to child hunger. (The issue has rather been about distribution networks in Africa and Asia, not global supply of food.)
4. The post-Fukushima shutdown of nuclear was a huge tragedy.
5. How much effect has anti-GMO had on world nutrition? Don't they use plenty of GMOs in the places where nutrition is an issue?
6. Some stricter building codes are in fact worsening housing prices, but some are also saving lots of lives in modern earthquakes. I'd want a deeper accounting to understand which are which, and whether the net effect has been positive or negative.
7. Agreed that the FDA has gotten too conservative.
1. Yes, afaik DDT continued to be used in South Asia, at least. I remember Africa as the place with markedly reduced use - what kind of "ban" if the stuff was used same as before? Turning to wikipedia: esp. India kept production relatively high; elsewhere the reduced production let to higher costs and much less use. The outspoken critics may be wrong or right. (wikip quotes rather weak "arguments" against them) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Criticism_of_restrictions_on_DDT_use
2. so what made the Chinese do it? Horoscopes? C'mon.
3. The world is flat, markets for everything, certainly for food. If the US et al. produces less corn for human consumption (or less of any food),
this leads directly to higher world prices of food. Mexicans (and south of M.) do care about the price of corn.
5. We will never know. We don't use any in the EU. (also: see 3.). Not much in Africa either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organism#Crops Golden rice only started 2018 (how many years late - feels it was with us half my life, and GMO-scare was with us always - me boomer, ok).
6. No earthquakes here. Not even tornadoes - but indeed: growth leads to wealth leads to safer housing - and due to this and many other reasons all connected with growth to a fall in deaths-by-natural-disaster - no matter what climate.
7. At least in the US some wonder if the FDA could be tiny bit more helpful. German media see it as a given that all this must take exactly as much time as it takes the EMA and RKI. (maybe I should write "mostly" - but then I actually do follow our media and never saw a take as Zvi: "Omicron is coming. Boosters won’t be updated in time.
Paxlovid remains illegal.")
Scaring too much and panic is a thing. A very dangerous one. Or do the sequels state somewhere: "Yeah, go and panic. No such thing as 'being scared too much'"?
That picture is very great.
Here's a friendly heads up from a medievalist that a whole lot of historians of medicine no longer think the Black Death was bubonic plague. They think it was almost certainly a human-to-human airborne disease of an unknown type. It spread lightning-fast (much more like covid than plague), turned up in places where there weren't rats (like Iceland and remote mountain villages), and killed very fast (1-2 days versus bubonic plague's 7-10 days). So -- basically imagine Covid, only with pustules and bloody vomit rather than coughing, and with a 30-50% death rate. Since we don't know what the disease was, it's unknown whether good sanitation would have made a difference.
The re-evaluation of the Black Death has been going on for about 20 years; one of the earlier papers making the case against bubonic plague is here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/04/020415073417.htm.
In short: we better hope the lab in Wuhan stays away from this one!
I thought they'd proved that the pathogen was Yersinia Pestis. They've been digging up grave sites and writing papers claiming Plague was the cause since 2010. I think the hypothesis changed to pneumonic plague over bubonic plague because of the speed of transmission and the other points you've made.
What is the origin of the Plague (either bubonic or pneumonic) hypothesis anyway? I suspect if the original hypothesis was based on questionable logic, then subsequent confirmation of it is biased.
The Plague hypothesis got going in the 19th century, and the main reason for it was the pustules/boils. Lots of medieval descriptions of the Black Death include reference to boils, and so 19th-century scholars assumed it must have been yersinia pestis, because Plague was such "a thing" in their day anyway. The convenient thing is that lots of pre-19th-century people also had yersinia pestis, so there were of course lots of bodies with yp to confirm this. The re-evaluation of the Plague hypothesis started when enough historians realized that (1) the BD spread too quickly for any form of yersinia pestis and (2) the time from infection to death was too quick. (Yersinia pestis consistently takes 7-10 days, but what freaked out the medieval chroniclers is that healthy young people could wake up in the morning feeling fine, be breaking out in boils by noon, and be dead the next day.) Then scholars finally started asking "what other deadly diseases can cause pustules under the right conditions?" -- and it turns out that the grocery list is quite long.
> Yersinia pestis consistently takes 7-10 days
The pneumonic variant kills people in much less time than that - I think often in less than 2 days. Then again, the formation of pustules isn't one of the symptoms, so the YP hypothesis remains a questionable one.
Hm! That's interesting - I didn't know the pneumonic version had that short a turnaround. I don't recall it being talked about in the lit. Maybe there's a more recent discussion; it's been about 4 years since I actually looked at the research!
Am I the only one that incorrectly thought Anthrax was a fungus all this time? I blame the ‘spore’ terminology.
It lives in the dirt, too!
It doesn't really live in the dirt. Its spores can hibernate in the dirt for decades, but it needs to infect something to gain energy and reproduce.
Spores aren't specific to fungi. Plants have them too (these are a separate thing from seeds, which only some plants have; all plants have spores).
👻👻👻👻Oooooooh👻👻👻 I am the Spooky ghost of Arthur Jensen doomed to haunted the lead contaminated streets of Baltimore for all time. I bring the curse of multiple sclerosis to all those who misrepresent heritability or believe Linda Gottfriedson’s genocidal horseshit.
Racists, worshippers of psychometric g, repent! It's just myelin and glial cells. White people are just sort of mediocre dickheads who poisoned themselves. 👻👻👻Ooooooooh👻👻👻
Scott, email me.
I’m the archivist for a hospital, so that envelope full of scabs gives me the willies on a rather personal level.
Wait, blog.jaibot is back up? wasnt this an old blog of yours that SSC linked to occasionaly but all the links were dead? Or am I just confusing it with your livejournal :)
(Which I know can still be dug up through wayback machine, but it’s a bit of a hassle)
Blog.jaibot isn't by me.
Something something The Talos Princple game something.
Good work as always!
Another reason bubonic plague is much less deadly than it used to be might be that all the people who were particularly succeptible to it died.
I also raised an eyebrow at this point in The Uninhabitable Earth. It is absolutely possible for ancient organisms to survive freezing, but the risk from that seems quite small relative to the apparent and pretty quantifiable risk of continual habitat destruction causing previously wilderness-only diseases to run around in human-occupied areas.
Add to that increased mosquito habitat and you have plenty to worry about from warming areas.
Speaking of "Arctic ice" one of the most profound movies about the struggle for survival is "March of the Penguins" (2005), a documentary about the annual 70-mile walk Emperor penguins take in order to find a mate and raise a baby chick in the harsh climate of Antarctica.
The Life Lesson from this movie, which applies to all of us and all of this DOOMism, is:
"Life is a beautiful struggle—splendor and sadness co-exist for us all."
From: Movie Wisdom On Parenting Children
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/movies-on-parenting-children
>Animal diseases can't trivially become contagious among humans. Sometimes an animal disease jumps from beast to man, like COVID or HIV, but these are rare and epochal events. Usually they happen when the disease is very common in some population of animals that lives very close to humans for a long time. It’s not “one guy digs up a reindeer and then boom”.
Or uh, you know when Ecohealth and Daszek have been doing some fishy shit along with the Chinese military.
I think part of the answer to the flu thing is the “novelty is severity” argument that Zeynep has been highlighting. A lot of why diseases become less severe over time is not that they evolve that way, but instead that we get exposed to more and more similar diseases and our immune systems get trained. So the 1918 flu was a completely novel disease jumping from animals into people, but since then we have been exposed to lots of similar flu viruses with similar structures and therefore have some level of defence against them.
"why would a flu evolve into an inferior flu"
Define "inferior"
Evolution rests on current conditions. One way diseases evolve is within individuals. It's great for a disease to spread fast, but then you also get evolution among the populations of virus in a single human.
So you may start off with a flu strain optimised to spread... but then it survives in some immune compromised or weakened individuals for months or perhaps even years and the strain that it becomes while doing so is highly adapted for evading a (weakened) human immune system over long time periods.
because viruses don't have a single environment to adapt to, it's not a matter of a single search space, rather they have different parts of their lifecycle and adapting really well to one part may make them worse in another.
Then throw in some recombination .
Viral recombination occurs when viruses of two different parent strains coinfect the same host cell and interact during replication to generate virus progeny that have some genes from both parents.
Something like 10% of people have an active influenza infection at any given time, it's just that mostly they sit quietly in your nasal cavity avoiding the interest of the immune system. Sometimes these stealthy versions swap genes with nastier versions of influenza to produce interesting combinations.