IT'S essential to begin by saying the danger to Northern Ireland from the coronavirus outbreak in China is limited, and there is no need for anyone to be unduly worried. However, that doesn't mean we should become complacent.
A few weeks ago, I began watching a new documentary series on Netflix called Pandemic – How to Prevent an Outbreak. I suspect my interest in the series dates back to my reading of the 1995 book The Hot Zone. The author, Richard Preston, while writing the book in the style of a thriller, based it on facts around an Ebola outbreak in the US in 1989.
I remember the impact the book had on me; I became aware not only of Ebola but the myriad other 'wild viruses' with the potential to jump species and infect humans. News reports of the unfolding coronavirus outbreak in the city of Wuhan in China therefore made me feel that what I'd read about in the past, and was watching in the present, was becoming a horrific reality.
Flu pandemics are nothing new. The worst outbreak, in 1918, caused the deaths of somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, in what became known as the 'Spanish flu' pandemic. To put this number into context, Spanish flu killed more than the total number of deaths during both world wars.
While Ebola rose to the forefront of public consciousness after an outbreak in west Africa between 2013 and 2015, causing 10,000 fatalities, it is a mutating flu virus which has always been the nightmare for virologists.
I happened on an article in the Guardian by medical historian and journalist Mark Honigsbaum from 2018, marking the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu outbreak. He interviewed Jeffrey Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist and an expert on the 1918 pandemic. Taubenberger had, Frankenstein-style, resurrected the virus for research. He achieved this by taking a sample from the lungs of a known victim – an Inuit woman found buried in permafrost, which had preserved her body tissue.
He discovered the virus's genetic sequence was undoubtedly 'avian-like' and therefore the disease had most likely jumped from birds to humans. His subsequent prophetic finding was that 'the H7N9 flu', which is causing sporadic human infections in China, might suddenly acquire the ability to trigger a similarly devastating pandemic.
The Chinese government, while initially slow in its response to the outbreak, has ramped up its efforts. Strange as this may sound, we should be thankful this outbreak happened in China. Only such an authoritarian state could enact the draconian measures necessary to quarantine a population of millions, build 1,000-bed hospitals in weeks and stop all travel within its borders.
Coronavirus in China coincided with their New Year celebrations, with the tradition for family members to travel from cities to rural homes. This undoubtedly would have led to an explosion in the transmission of the virus – a major accelerant in the transfer of the Spanish flu was the millions of soldiers travelling home at the end of the First World War.
News that a man who'd flown from Wuhan province to Belfast was undergoing tests for the infection (since proved negative) in the Royal Victoria Hospital proved that distance is no longer a barrier to such viruses. Today, everywhere on Earth is but a couple of day’s jet travel away.
Even when we discover effective vaccines for diseases, the danger doesn't end. The US declared the eradication of measles in 2000, yet by 2019 it was back. Ill-informed parents refused immunisation for their children due to unfounded fear of links between the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and autism.
While the world rightly focuses on global warming as a potential extinction event for humanity, it is far from the only threat. One major contributor to global warming is worldwide deforestation to create agricultural land. Such activity exponentially increases the danger of 'wild viruses' jumping species into humanity.
In HG Wells’s 1898 science fiction classic War of The Worlds an invading alien force from Mars is stopped not by military might but by their inability to deal with a simple virus.
As humanity operates a policy of scorched earth, despoiling the last vestiges of virgin rainforest, a multitude of deadly viruses hide. They have rested dormant in their hosts, be they bats, birds or wild boars for millennia. As some unsuspecting subsistence farmer clears the forest to feed his family, all the while surviving on 'bush meat', his infection will become 'ground zero'.
Like Wells's novel, this may prove the catalyst which finally ends humanity’s invasion of planet Earth.
Don’t have nightmares.
