Tales of contagion

I have to admit to a morbid fascination with things that can kill you in nasty ways.

Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, mass extinctions from giant meteorite collisions -- and epidemics.  I remember first reading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, about an outbreak of the Black Death in London in 1664 and 1665, when I was in college, and being simultaneously horrified and mesmerized at the scale of it.  An estimated 100,000 people died in two years -- a quarter of London's population.

But even that is dwarfed by two other epidemics.  First, there's the infamous outbreak of bubonic plague that started in 1347 and, by some estimates, killed one-third of the human population of the Earth -- something on the order of fifty million people.  The worst, though, was the "Spanish flu" epidemic of 1918 and 1919.  Odd that an event only a hundred years ago, and that killed an estimated 75 million people worldwide -- twice as many as World War I, which was happening at the same time -- is much less known.  Mention the Black Death, and almost everyone has an idea of what it is; mention the Spanish flu, and often all you get is a puzzled look.

Danse Macabre by Michael Wolgemut [image is in the Public Domain]

This all comes up because of a paper by Maria Spyrou et al. that appeared in Nature: Communications last week.  In it, the researchers describe looking for evidence of pathogens in the Bronze-Age burial sites -- and finding evidence that the bubonic plague has been with us for a long, long time.  The authors write:

The origin of Yersinia pestis and the early stages of its evolution are fundamental subjects of investigation given its high virulence and mortality that resulted from past pandemics.  Although the earliest evidence of Y. pestis infections in humans has been identified in Late Neolithic/Bronze Age Eurasia (LNBA 5000–3500y BP), these strains lack key genetic components required for flea adaptation, thus making their mode of transmission and disease presentation in humans unclear.  Here, we reconstruct ancient Y. pestis genomes from individuals associated with the Late Bronze Age period (~3800 BP) in the Samara region of modern-day Russia.  We show clear distinctions between our new strains and the LNBA lineage, and suggest that the full ability for flea-mediated transmission causing bubonic plague evolved more than 1000 years earlier than previously suggested.  Finally, we propose that several Y. pestis lineages were established during the Bronze Age, some of which persist to the present day.

Which is fascinating enough, but it bears mention that there are still a number of epidemics that scientists have no clear explanation for.  Here are three of the most puzzling:

1. "Sweating sickness."  In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, several waves of contagious illness swept through western Europe.  It killed fast -- starting with disorientation, fever, chills, aching joints, and finally progressing to delirium and copious sweating.  Most of the victims died within 36 hours of the onset.  It claimed a number of well-known victims, including Prince Arthur of England -- the son of King Henry VII, and brother of King Henry VIII.  Arthur's death at the age of fifteen put Henry in line for the throne, and set into motion events that would change the world -- such as the English Reformation and the founding of the Anglican Church.  Sweating sickness went as quickly as it started -- the last outbreak was in 1551, and it hasn't been seen since.  Scientists are still mystified as to the cause, but the speculation is it might have been a hantavirus, carried by mice.
2. The Dancing Plague of 1518.  In eastern France and western Germany, people were stricken by a disorder that caused shaking, mania, and... a desperation to dance.  People took to the streets, dancing desperately, many of them until they died of hunger, exposure, heat exhaustion, or stroke.  In Strasbourg alone, at the height of the plague, it was killing fifteen people a day.  It, like the sweating sickness, vanished as soon as it appeared, leaving everyone mystified as to its cause -- although some researchers suspect it might have been caused by ergot, a fungus that grows on wheat and rye and produces lysergic acid diethylamide -- LSD.
3. "Nodding syndrome."  This one is much more recent, having first emerged in the 1960s in Sudan.  It affects children, causing listlessness, stunting of growth (especially of the brain), and a peculiar symptom called a "nodding seizure," often triggered by eating or becoming cold.  The child's head bobs, and (s)he becomes unresponsive, the seizures lasting for up to ten or fifteen minutes.  It's progressive and fatal -- the usual duration being about three years.  To this day no one knows the cause, although some suspect it might be connected to parasitism by the roundworm Onchocercus volvulus, which is endemic in the area and also causes "river blindness."

So this combines my love of horrible things that can kill you with my love of unsolved mysteries.

Anyhow, I realize this is all kind of morbid, and I have no desire to ruin your mood.  After all, we live in an age where most of the worst diseases of antiquity have been vanished; even bubonic plague, if it's caught quickly, can be cured with antibiotics (and yes, there are still cases of it today).  Thankfully, we seem to have gotten rid of sweating sickness and the dancing plague, even if we've replaced them with Ebola fever and chikungunya and West Nile virus.  I'll still take what we've got today over life in the past, which was (accurately) described by Thomas Hobbes as "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

Have a nice day.

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This week's recommended read is Wait, What? And Life's Other Essential Questions by James E. Ryan.  Ryan frames the whole of critical thinking in a fascinating way.  He says we can avoid most of the pitfalls in logic by asking five questions: "What?"  "I wonder..." "Couldn't we at least...?" "How can I help?" and "What truly matters?"  Along the way, he considers examples from history, politics, and science, and encourages you to think about the deep issues -- and not to take anything for granted.

Historical hype, government coverups, and the "Spanish flu"

At the heart of skepticism is a philosophy that says, basically, "question everything."  I would add a few "especiallies:"

• especially if the claim appeals to your personal biases and fears;
• especially if it seems sensationalized;
• especially if there is no hard data to support it;
• and especially if it's claiming that the reason there's no data is because of a government coverup.

 I ran into an excellent example of this just yesterday, with an article on The Liberty Digest titled, "U.S. Government Kills 100 Million People -- Deflects All Blame," by Truman Jackson.  My first thought was to wonder how 100 million people could have died without my noticing, but upon opening the link I found that he wasn't talking about something recent.

He was talking about the "Spanish flu."

An influenza hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas, winter 1918 (photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

What followed was such a mixture of truth, half truth, and complete bullshit that the author should win some kind of award for Best Example of Journalistic Hash, 2013.  Here's his claim, to which I've added a few annotations of my own:

Consider this a history lesson. At the time, it was an experiment in attrition and public gullibility, and both experiments proved favorable to ‘the powers that be’ as far as the outcome obtained.

It’s referred to as the Great Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 in the history books, but there was nothing Spanish about this plague that killed between 20 million and 100 million people world-wide. [True.  It was the worst pandemic in modern history, rivaling or perhaps exceeding the 14th century Black Death.]  It was 100% U.S. Government controlled and engineered.  [Bullshit.]

In a nutshell, while mass troop movements were heading to Europe during WWI, the U.S. Government, through the Department of the Army, was experimenting with this really neat, and new for the time, technology, called vaccines.  [True.]  They were injecting flu vaccine, among others, into soldiers who were on their way to fight in the “war to end all wars.”  [False, and not only false, but impossible.  The first flu vaccines weren't developed until 1931, twelve years after the epidemic, and World War I, both ended.]

As everyone knows, most vaccines have a strain of that of which they are supposed to be preventing, and in this case, a common strain of flu common for the U.S. at least.  [True in essence.]

However, the strain was not common in Europe and the rest of the world and the other people who inhabited those countries had not had a chance for their immune systems to develop any defense against the U.S. flu strain.  [True, but misleading, because this more or less happens every year -- that's why there are epidemics.  If people had a "defense" against a strain, they wouldn't get sick.  It doesn't require some sort of deliberate attempt by the U.S. to spread the disease, the virus is perfectly capable of doing that on its own.]

The result was catastrophic, and some would say diabolical. Nearly 5% of the earth’s surface population at the time was killed by the outbreak of the flu.  ["Diabolical" implies intent, so while the percent mortality is accurate, the implication is not.]

How did Spain get the blame?

Simple.

The ‘powers that be’ who were involved with the war made sure to keep a tight lid on the story of the flu. They feared world-wide riots should the populace learn the facts behind how far and wide the outbreak had spread. However, Spain was “neutral” during the war, and they openly reported on the havoc the virus was causing in their country. As a result they ended up getting the blame for the outbreak, and nothing could have pleased the ‘powers that be’ more. Remember, no good dead [sic] goes unpunished.  [Bullshit.  Although the author is correct that the identification of Spain as the origin of the epidemic was probably false, no one was trying to "blame Spain" for some sort of geopolitical reason, any more than calling the 1968 "Hong Kong flu" was an attempt to blame China.]

Many experts who have written on the “Spanish” influenza which killed upwards of 100 million people, believe the virus actually originated at an Army base in Kansas.  [Half-truth.  The origins of the virus are still uncertain.  Epidemiologists have proposed France, Austria, and China as alternate explanations, but the fact is, we don't know where it came from.]

So what we have here is the usual conspiracy nonsense, bolstered by people's fears of the side effects of vaccination due to the insidious work of such discredited nutjobs as Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy.

Of course, the timing of this article is no coincidence; the 2013-2014 flu season is just ramping up, and people are considering whether to get vaccinated.  Anti-vaxx hype is big this year, although studies debunking the supposed horrible side effects of vaccines clearly demonstrate that the risks of vaccination are vastly outweighed by the risks of contracting preventable diseases.  Flu kills thousands of people yearly, and most years the vaccine does a pretty good job of preventing the disease.  (I have to use the qualifiers "most" and "pretty good" because the flu virus is notorious for mutating, and the vaccine is based upon a best-guess of what the strains that year will be.  Every so often, the researchers don't get it right, and there's a strain prevalent that the vaccine doesn't immunize you against.  Even so, they get it right far more often than they get it wrong, and the benefit still far outweighs the risk.)

But no wonder that this article is making the rounds of social media, anti-vaxx websites, anti-government websites, and conspiracy theory websites.  It hits all of my "especiallies;" it caters to preconceived biases and fears, it's sensationalized, it has nothing in the way of data proving its points, and it claims that the reason for the lack of evidence is a conspiracy.

The nice thing about the Internet Age is that we have virtually instantaneous access to information, and with a little bit of training, anyone can learn to sift the truth from the bullshit.  Start, for example, by looking only at sources that are peer-reviewed -- it's not a guarantee of accuracy, but at least you've raised the bar from the kind of tripe published in places like The Liberty Digest.  Ask questions, especially "how does the author know this claim is true?"  Question your own biases and assumptions.

And never, ever accept what someone says without evidence.