zoonotic diseases

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Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

A butterfly? A bat? To reside undetected within a reservoir host is probably easiest wherever biological diversity is high and the ecosystem is relatively undisturbed. The converse is also true: Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of small, complex creatures such as amoebae, formerly but misleadingly known as protozoans), prions, and worms. Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut’s infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat’s Cradle.

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Answer from the scientists: We don’t know but we’re working on it. 6 Hendra virus in 1994 was just one thump in a drumbeat of bad news. The drumbeat has been sounding ever more loudly, more insistently, more rapidly over the past fifty years. When and where did it start, this modern era of emerging zoonotic diseases? To choose one point is a little artificial, but a good candidate would be the emergence of Machupo virus among Bolivian villagers between 1959 and 1963. Machupo wasn’t called Machupo at the start, of course, nor even recognized as a virus. Machupo is the name of a small river draining the northeastern Bolivian lowlands.

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For all his honors, for all his mathematical skills, for all his combative ambition and obsessive hard work, Ronald Ross couldn’t conquer malaria, nor even provide a strategy by which such an absolute victory would eventually be won. He may have understood why: because it’s such an intricate disease, deeply entangled with human social and economic considerations as well as ecological ones, and therefore a problem more complicated than even differential calculus can express. 25 When I first wrote about zoonotic diseases, for National Geographic in 2007, I was given to understand that malaria was not one. No, I was told, you’ll want to leave it off your list. Malaria is a vector-borne disease, yes, in that insects carry it from one host to another. But vectors are not hosts; they belong to a different ecological category from, say, reservoirs; and they experience the presence of the pathogen in a different way.

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

Entire ancient civilizations fell prey to diseases birthed in the barnyard.914 The second era came with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, resulting in an epidemic of the so-called diseases of civilization, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.915 Chronic diseases now account for seven out of ten deaths in the United States916 and the majority of deaths worldwide.917 Thankfully, these diseases are considered “largely preventable” through changes in diet and lifestyle.918 We have now entered into the third age of human disease, which started around forty years ago—the emergence (or re-emergence) of zoonotic diseases.919 Medical historians describe these last decades as the age of “the emerging plagues.”920 Never in medical history have so many new diseases appeared in so short a time, and the trend is continuing. We may soon be facing, according to the National Academy of Medicine, a “catastrophic storm of microbial threats.”921 We know that most of these new diseases are coming from animals, but animals were domesticated ten thousand years ago. Why now? What is responsible for this recent fury of new and re-emerging zoonotic disease? Starting in the last quarter of the twentieth century, medicine has been examining emerging disease within an increasingly ecological framework.

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“And the hogs may not be the only ones to get sick.”1092 Even industry groups, like the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, have blamed “[e]merging livestock production systems, particularly where they involve increased intensification” as a main reason why zoonotic diseases are of increasing concern. These intensive systems, in addition to their high population density, “may also generate pathogen build-ups or impair the capacity of animals to withstand infectious agents.”1093 Increasing consumer demand for animal products worldwide over the past few decades has led to a global explosion in massive animal agriculture operations which have come to play a key role in the Third Age of emerging human disease.1094 LIVESTOCK REVOLUTION Breeding Grounds In response to the torrent of emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases jumping from animals to people, the world’s three leading authorities—the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE)—held a joint consultation in 2004 to determine the key underlying causes.

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The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York, NY: Penguin Books). 366. Shortridge KF. 1999. Influenza—a continuing detective story. Lancet 354:siv29. 367. Davies P. 2000. The Devil’s Flu (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company). 368. McNamara TS. 2002. Diagnosis and control of zoonotic infections: pathology and early recognition of zoonotic disease outbreaks. In: The Emergence of Zoonotic Diseases: Understanding the Impact on Animal and Human Health—Workshop Summary (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, pp. 64–78). 369. Leitner T (ed.). 2002. The Molecular Epidemiology of Human Viruses (Berlin, Germany: Springer Science and Business Media). 370. Laver WG, Bischofberger N, Webster RG. 2000.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

The appearance of new human diseases such as bird flu and other novel influenzas like COVID-19—zoonotic diseases that cross from animal to human—coincide with our modern era of optimizing life, of industrialized agriculture and subsequent habitat loss. The evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace has shown how this highly optimized, industrial farming of meat is leading to the unchecked creation of devastating new pathogens. For multinational agribusinesses and the governments that support them, “it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” A 2015 paper on zoonotic disease worriedly proclaims that 60 percent of all emerging diseases are now zoonotic, and 80 percent of new pathogens come from the top pork-producing countries—places like China.3 With meat consumption growing worldwide, we might just eat enough to also snuff ourselves out.

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The city has become a world of strange contrasts, with riot police standing guard outside cosmetic stores as people buy mascara, and police violence against protesters in luxury shopping malls. Banks and stores associated with the Chinese government have been shuttered; storefronts protectively shrouded in plaster are covered in protest graffiti. Reports of a new zoonotic disease from mainland China causing flu-like symptoms in humans has added to the city’s unease, the memory of SARS still recent. The tropical air smells faintly sweet, laden with the figures of Hong Kong’s colonial past and the decline of empire. I try the exercise posted on the Facebook page. I close my eyes.

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“Chinese Tech Companies Get into Farming,” The Economist, October 27, 2018, http://www.economist.com/business/2018/10/27/chinese-tech-companies-get-into-farming.   3.  Dipendra Thapaliya, Blake M. Hanson, Ashley Kates, Cassandra A. Klostermann, Rajeshwari Nair, Shylo E. Wardyn, and Tara C. Smith, “Zoonotic Diseases of Swine: Food-Borne and Occupational Aspects of Infection,” in Zoonoses—Infections Affecting Humans and Animals, ed. Andreas Sing (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2015), 23–68.   4.  Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, “The Metamorphosis,” The Atlantic, August 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-kissinger-the-metamorphosis-ai/592771/.   5.  

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The consumption of ‘bushmeat’ – animals such as apes, rats, bats and pangolins – is another factor in the growth of zoonotic diseases. While a small amount of bushmeat is eaten as a delicacy, most consumption occurs due to the absence of alternatives. HIV and Ebola are likely to have made their way to humans through this practice.36 It is estimated that as much as 5 million tonnes of wild animals are caught and eaten every year in the Congo basin alone.37 Most major new zoonotic diseases in living memory have emerged in the developing world, and are likely to continue doing so for the reasons mentioned above.

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Such conditions facilitate the rapid transmission of infectious diseases among livestock, while the increased live transportation of animals over long distances makes outbreaks difficult to control.33 The disruption of wild habitats by the global population’s expanding physical footprint has also contributed to the rising number of zoonotic diseases being transmitted to humans. In 1998, the fatal Nipah virus first appeared in Malaysia. While the disease spread to humans through infected pigs, it originally passed to those pigs via fruit bats that had been displaced by deforestation.34 Such transmissions will continue to occur so long as we keep clearing 10 million hectares of forest around the world every year.35 Most of this occurs in developing countries, with countries like Indonesia, Brazil and Malaysia deriving a significant share of their national income from export crops like soya, coffee or palm oil.

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Index abortion here abstract mathematics here Achaemenid Empire here Adani, Gautam here agglomeration effects here agriculture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and carbon emissions here and disease here, here productivity here, here vertical farming here Ahmedabad here air-conditioning here, here airports here, here, here, here Albuquerque here Alexandria here Allen, Paul here Allen, Thomas here Altrincham here Amazon here, here, here Amazon rainforest here Amsterdam here Anatolia here Anderson, Benedict here Anheuser-Busch here antibiotics here, here, here Antonine Plague here Anyang here apartment conversions here, here Apple here, here, here Aristotle here Arizona State University here Arlington here Assyrian merchants here Athens, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Atlanta here, here Austin here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here axial precession here Baghdad, House of Wisdom here Baltimore here, here Bangalore here, here Bangkok here Bangladesh here, here, here, here Barlow, John Perry here Bauhaus here Beijing here, here Belmar redevelopment here Berkes, Enrico here Berlin here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bezos, Jeff here biological weapons here ‘biophilia’ here biospheres here bird flu here Birmingham here, here Black Death here, here, here Blake, William here Bloom, Nick here BMW here ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) here, here, here Boccaccio, Giovanni here Boeing here, here, here Bogota here Bologna here Bonfire of the Vanities here Borneo here Boston here, here, here Boston University here, here Brand, Stewart here Brazil here, here Brexit here, here, here Bristol here Britain broadcasting here deindustrialization here education here enclosure movement here foreign aid here high-speed rail here, here house prices here immigration here industrialization here, here infant mortality here ‘levelling up’ here life expectancy here mayoralties here per capita emissions here per capita 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here tradeable and non-tradeable here Justinian Plague here Kashmir here Kenya here Kinshasa here, here Kish here knowledge workers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Koch, Robert here Kolkata here Korean War here Krugman, Paul here Kushim Tablet here Lagash here Lagos here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lahore here land titling programmes here Las Vegas here Latin language here Lee Kuan Yew here, here Leeds here, here Leicester here Leipzig here, here, here, here Letchworth here life expectancy here, here, here, here, here, here Liverpool here, here Ljubljana here London here, here, here, here, here, here, here bike lanes here Canary Wharf here, here Chelsea here, here, here China Town here cholera outbreaks here City of London here, here coffeehouses here and Covid-19 pandemic here financial services here gentrification here, here, here Great Stink here, here heatwaves here, here house prices here, here hybrid working here, here 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sea levels here slum housing here suburbanization here, here subway here waste and recycling here New York Central Railroad here New York World Fair here Newcastle here Nextdoor here Niger here Nigeria here, here, here, here Nilles, Jack here, here Nipah virus here Norway here, here Nottingham here Novgorod here ocean and air circulation here office rental and sales prices here Ohlin, Bertil here Oldenburg, Ray here online deliveries here OpenTable here Osaka here, here Oslo here Ottoman Empire here Oxford, population of here Oxford University here Pacific Belt Zone here Padua here Pakistan here, here, here pandemics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and zoonotic diseases here paramyxovirus here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Paris Conference (2015) here Park Chung-hee, General here parks here Pasteur, Louis here Pearl River Delta here, here Peñalosa, Enrique here per 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50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 2023 Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work All rights reserved.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

No one can predict what exactly will trigger the next shock even if the bear market in many equity markets in the first half of 2022 signaled that the latest asset bubble was nearing an end. There are plenty of candidates: a massive market bubble bursting as in 1929; a surge in inflation forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy in a draconian way, leading to an unsustainable rise in interest rates; pandemics worse than COVID-19 as zoonotic diseases transmitted from animals to humans become more frequent and virulent; a corporate debt crisis stemming from a credit crunch as interest rates rise; a new housing bubble and then bust clobbering homeowners and lenders; a geopolitical shock like the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022 escalating and becoming more severe, leading to further spikes in commodity prices and inflation; other geopolitical risks; and the rising risk of another global recession triggered by the confluence of the above risks.

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Since 1980, by contrast, we have been hit by HIV, SARS, MERS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zika, and now COVID-19 and its multiple variants. Why? One hypothesis blames the destruction of animal ecosystems on climate change. Thus, bats, pangolins, and other animals carrying dangerous pathogens live in closer proximity with livestock and humans, making transmission of zoonotic diseases nearly inevitable. An investigation by Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment has focused on this linkage. “With fewer places to live and fewer food sources to feed on, animals find food and shelter where people are, and that can lead to disease spread,” says Dr.

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Geopolitical discord impedes united action against the world’s most sweeping peril: global climate change, which threatens life on earth for billions of people in regions too hot or too flooded to inhabit. Earth’s rising temperature will unleash storms and heat waves more frequent and more severe than humans can endure. These conditions will precipitate biological catastrophe. When ecosystems deteriorate, living spaces press animals and humans closer together. Zoonotic diseases will spawn pandemics and tax health care networks more than ever. As skies warm, melting permafrost will release even more pathogens frozen for millennia. When COVID-19 is in the rearview mirror, it won’t mean the end of severe global pandemics. It’s just a question of when the next virulent one will strike, and how fast we can respond—if we can respond.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Exercise The Importance of the Long Haul Chapter 12: Building a Community Chapter 13: Hatching a Plan Jotting Down Scenarios of Concern Modeling Sequences of Events Defining Basic Strategies Identifying Indicators and Decision Points Planning to Fail Facing the Final Contingency From Plans to Supplies Part III: The Essentials Chapter 14: The Discreet Charm of the Bulletproof Vest Chapter 15: Water Estimating Water Needs Household Storage Options Hydration on the Road Long-Term Storage Tips Chapter 16: Nourishment Estimating Bulk Calorie Needs Nutrition in the Long Haul Picking a Storage Strategy Keeping Stockpiled Foods Fresh Stocking the Doomsday Pantry Specialty Survival Foods Backyard Gardens as a Source of Food Chapter 17: Sanitation, Hygiene, and Health Waste Disposal Containment of Flooding and Leaks Dishwashing, Laundry, and Other Chores Personal Hygiene Medication and Medical Supplies Medical Skills Chapter 18: Fuel and Electricity Keeping the Lights On Powering Small Electronics Staying Warm Staying Cool Cooking Getting Around Looking Beyond Short-Term Outages Chapter 19: Household and Vehicle Tools Storm Cleanup Equipment Dealing with Car Malfunctions Other Household Gear Chapter 20: Evacuation Gear General Preparations Setting Up a Camp Bad Weather Preps Food and Water in the Wild Knives and Other Camping Tools Wildlife Management and Physical Security Chapter 21: Protection Against Pollutants and Disease Human-to-Human Transmission of Diseases Zoonotic Disease Vector Control Smoke and Industrial Accidents Nuclear Disaster Preps Chapter 22: Emergency Communications The Lost Art of Pen and Paper Satellite Communications Two-Way Radios Understanding the Range of Handhelds Radio Bands and Types of Service Digital Radios and Data Transmission Licensing Requirements Looking Beyond Handhelds Chapter 23: Entertainment and More Part IV: Active Self-Defense Chapter 24: The Politics of Putting Up a Fight Chapter 25: Standing Up for Your Belongings What You Aren’t Allowed to Do Buying Some Peace of Mind Buying Time Chapter 26: Fighting for Your Life The Legalities of Self-Defense The Right to Arm Yourself The Merits of Unarmed Combat Less-Lethal Defense Tools Weapons That Kill Chapter 27: Understanding Firearms Handguns Semiautomatic Pistols Revolvers Other Concealable Firearms Deciding on Handgun Caliber and Size Long Guns Rifles Shotguns Ammunition Firearm Safety Rules Firearm Storage Getting Good Epilogue Endnotes Index Practical Doomsday A User’s Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski PRACTICAL DOOMSDAY.

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If you choose this option, having a way to spray the suit with diluted plastic-safe disinfectant upon exiting any high-risk area would be a good plan to avoid cross-contamination. Although it’s difficult to make blanket statements, Diversey Oxivir Five 16, Expose, and Virex II 256 are three commercial sanitization products with very different chemistries—peroxide, quaternary ammonium salt, and phenolic—that would probably do the trick. Zoonotic Disease Vector Control Respiratory ailments have gotten the lion’s share of public attention in the last 20 years, but illnesses transmitted by animals have a remarkably grim track record too: even if we forget the Black Death, malaria still kills around 2.5 million people a year. Malaria may seem like a distant problem confined to the developing world, but it was common in the United States until the early 1950s, when the government undertook a large-scale eradication campaign and sprayed more than 5 million homes with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (also known as DDT).7 I find it conceivable that a new zoonotic disease could make inroads in wealthy nations, or that one of the old hits could make a comeback—especially if economic trouble or political unrest mounts down the line.

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Malaria may seem like a distant problem confined to the developing world, but it was common in the United States until the early 1950s, when the government undertook a large-scale eradication campaign and sprayed more than 5 million homes with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (also known as DDT).7 I find it conceivable that a new zoonotic disease could make inroads in wealthy nations, or that one of the old hits could make a comeback—especially if economic trouble or political unrest mounts down the line. For the control of disease-carrying flying insects, malaria provides a solid playbook. Some of the simplest control techniques include window screens, bed nets, head nets, and the removal of breeding grounds such as stagnant water around the home.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

The epidemic itself is another reminder that escapes can be temporary, and that great epidemics of infectious disease—HIV/AIDS now, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Black Death in medieval times—are not safely confined to the past. Much attention, in both the scientific and the popular press, has been paid to current threats from “emerging” infectious diseases, particularly those, like HIV/AIDS, that crossed from animal reservoirs to humans. There are many such “zoonotic” diseases, some spectacularly and quickly lethal. Yet this is a lethality that makes it almost impossible for them to turn into large-scale epidemics; killing victims is good for neither the victims nor the bugs. HIV/AIDS, which is not easily transmitted and which kills very slowly, poses a much greater danger, and the pandemic that it caused should discourage us from believing that such diseases can be safely ignored in the future.

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Hunter-gatherers were exempt from some infectious diseases, though others, like malaria, have likely been present throughout human history. Small groups cannot maintain infectious diseases, such as smallpox, tuberculosis, or measles, that confer (sometimes limited) immunity upon recovery, but they are subject to zoonotic diseases whose normal hosts are wild animals or the soil, as well as to a range of parasites such as worms. Life expectancy at birth among hunter-gatherers, around 20–30 years depending on local conditions, was short by today’s standards, although not by historical standards in the West, nor within living memory in countries that remain poor today.

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See also gender differences World Bank: child mortality rate estimates of, 102; development projects of, 289–91, 300, 321–22; foreign aid of, 276–77, 280; health aid of, 104–5, 307; health care absenteeism surveys of, 123; health care spending estimates of, 120–21; income categories of, 111, 114; population control efforts, 243; poverty estimates of, 44–46, 252, 253–54; poverty lines of, 223, 248–49; poverty reduction mission of, 305; technical assistance of, 321–22 World Health Organization (WHO), 103–5, 108, 109, 137, 152, 307 World Trade Organization, 319 Wortley Montague, Lady Mary, 85 Wrigley, E. A., 81 Zaire, 27, 279, 282, 298. See also Democratic Republic of the Congo Zambia, 121, 296 Zheng He, 4, 11 Zimbabwe, 20, 48, 108, 279 zoonotic diseases, 77

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Kuiken Date: Saturday, 18 January 2020 at 16:08 To: Jeremy Farrar Subject: Wuhan coronavirus Dear Jeremy, Sorry to bother you on the weekend, but I have a dilemma about not disclosing info about the Wuhan coronavirus that I think should be made public. Do you mind to phone me about this at your earliest convenience at +31 ... Best wishes, Thijs. Thijs Kuiken, a veterinary pathologist by training who advises the Dutch government on the threat posed by zoonotic diseases (diseases that are transmitted between species, usually from animals to humans), is one of the unsung scientific heroes of the pandemic. He was sent a research paper on 16 January 2020 by the Lancet medical journal, to review for publication. This was one of the standout moments in the whole epidemic, the reddest in a constellation of red flags.

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WHO World Health Organization WIV Wuhan Institute of Virology Zika The mosquito-borne Zika virus causes Zika virus disease, and is named after the Zika forest in Uganda, where it was first identified in monkeys in 1947. Infections were rare until 2007, with Brazil seeing a record outbreak in 2015. zoonotic: a zoonotic disease (or zoonosis) is one that crosses from one species to another. Dramatis personae Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Director general of the World Health Organization (2017–), whose Emergency Committee declared the new coronavirus emerging in China to be a PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern) on 30 January 2020.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (The Science Press) XI: 589–600. Liggett, R. Winston, and H. Koffler. 1948 CE. “Corn Steep Liquor in Microbiology.” Bacteriological Reviews 297–311. “List of Zoonotic Diseases.” 2013 CE. Public Health England. March 21. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-zoonotic-diseases/list-of-zoonotic-diseases. Livermore, Harold. 2004 CE. “Santa Helena, a Forgotten Portuguese Discovery.” Estudos em Homenagem a Louis Antonio de Oliveira Ramos, 623–31. Lundin, Cody. 2007 CE. When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

One might argue that the spread of sedentism transformed Homo sapiens into far more of a herd animal than previously. Unprecedented concentrations of people, as in other herds, provided ideal conditions for epidemics and the sharing of parasites. But this aggregation was not a one-species herd but an aggregation of many mammalian herds who shared pathogens and generated entirely new zoonotic diseases by the mere fact of being assembled around the domus for the first time. Hence the term “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp.” We were all, one might say, crowded onto the same ark, sharing its microenvironment, sharing our germs and parasites, breathing its air. No wonder then that the archaeological signs for a life lived largely in the domus are strikingly similar for man and beast.

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To the degree that they were already “herd” or “flock” animals, they would have carried some species-specific pathogens of crowding. Assembled for the first time around the domus, in close and continuous contact, they quickly came to share a wide range of infective organisms. Estimates vary, but of the fourteen hundred known human pathogenic organisms, between eight hundred and nine hundred are zoonotic diseases, originating in nonhuman hosts. For most of these pathogens, Homo sapiens is a final “dead-end” host: humans do not transmit it further to another nonhuman host. The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Norton, 2012). 16“nature is declining globally”: United Nations, Sustainable Development Report: “Nature’s Dangerous Decline,” May 6, 2019, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/. 16“weapon of the weak”: James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 17 three-quarters of new human diseases: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Zoonotic Diseases,” https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html. 17 at a faster pace: Jon Hilsenrath, “Global Viral Outbreaks Like Coronavirus, Once Rare, Will Become More Common,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2020. 17 “perfect cauldron”: Christian Walzer, “COVID-19: Where It Starts and Stops,” Wildlife Conservation Society, Wildlife Health Program, https://youtu.be/_D_6a56zI_U?

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

However, while social connectivity is good for exchanging ideas and making financial transactions, it also speeds up more dubious activities and virus transmissions. When the pandemic and social distancing called into question dense urban life, skyscrapers took on a new meaning. While compact cities may have contributed to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, its opposite, urban sprawl, may have been a cause. Zoonotic diseases, which spring from animals to humans, are a result of our increasing wildlife-human interface. They are partially a consequence of the destruction of nature through deforestation and unbridled suburbanization. If we can limit our human footprint by creating compact cities, we may be able to better protect our forests and wildlife.

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See also cities agriculture and, 149, 246, 249, 270 biodiversity loss and, 262 China’s rise and, 101 dystopian image of, 239 economic growth and, 12–13, 239 enabled by train and elevator, 93 expected growth of, 13 exploded in nineteenth-century US, 181–82 urbanization (continued) heat island effect and, 257, 260 return from suburbs since 1980s, 146 skyscrapers and, 208 sustainable, 238 trees felled during, 246 zoonotic diseases and, 210 Uruk, 240–41 Van Alen, William, 186 Vancouver, energy limits, 136 vaults, 32, 56 Velázquez, Germán, 136 Velcro, 83 VIA 57 West, New York, 174, 175 views, 153, 157, 158–59, 168 Viñoly, Rafael, 164, 195, 204 Vitruvius, 26, 89–90, 151 volcanic ash, 26, 28, 55 vortex shedding, 69, 70 Wainwright, Oliver, 166, 202–3 Waldram, Percy, 158 Walkie-Talkie, 13, 164–65, 169, 260 waste, uses of, 264 water concrete and, 25, 26–27, 28, 33, 39 consumed by Burj Khalifa, 37 water systems green infrastructure and, 249–50 Roman viaducts and, 22, 55 of Singapore, 253, 254, 255, 258 wedding-cake style, 185–86, 189, 190, 199 West, Geoffrey, 209 Whyte, William H., 191 Willis, Carol, 185–86 Willis Tower, 65, 65–66, 67 Wilson, E.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Labor under capitalism puts our society, especially workers, unnecessarily in harm’s way. The big picture: unchecked capitalist development is responsible for introducing feral pathogens into human populations. The capitalist cocktail of ecological devastation and mass human migrations has given zoonotic disease a great leap forward. Urbanization and the destruction of tropical forests effectively eliminate the border between humans and the pathogens lurking inside wild animals. The subsequent decline of biodiversity combined with the erasure of those ecological borders presents new species as food sources.

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The degree of worker power fluctuates across Europe, but on average it is far greater than in the US, meaning American meatpackers also perform faster work for less pay. The declines in worker safety are correlated with adverse health for consumers too. Many of the most infectious and deadly zoonotic diseases—those we get from contact with sick animals—have emerged only recently, alongside the rising corporate consolidation of the industry and the increasing complexity of the global meat supply chain. Avian flu H1N1, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus, Nipah virus, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) are all products of the last two decades.35 The strength of nursing home unions to make a positive impact on public health stands in stark contrast to the weakness of those in meat and poultry processing.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

SARS inaugurated a new era of post-Westphalian public health – public health that transcended national borders and national sovereignties. And that new era itself was inaugurated with an achievement of spectacular proportions: ‘the global campaign against SARS achieved a victory that will go down in the annals of public health and international relations history.’ Since SARS, there have been two further major outbreaks of zoonotic disease. One was Ebola in 2013. Countries and global agencies displayed disgraceful complacency in their lacklustre response to Ebola. A year earlier, another coronavirus – causing the Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome – hit Saudi Arabia and spread to Qatar and several other countries in the Arab world.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

The Emergency Operations Center—a large, bright room, with serried rows of wooden desks facing a wall of video screens—exudes a mixture of urgency and professional calm. Brooks directed the Covid-19 task team with Greg Armstrong, a fellow epidemiologist. Armstrong oversaw the Office of Advanced Molecular Detection, a part of the CDC’s center for emerging and zoonotic diseases—those diseases that come from animals, as coronaviruses typically do. Humanity’s encroachment into formerly wild regions, coupled with climate change, has forced animals to migrate from traditional habitats. That has engendered a host of new diseases, including Ebola, Zika, West Nile, Nipah—just to mention a few that have arisen fairly recently.

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in the distant past: “Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV),” World Health Organization, March 11, 2019. incidental victims: L.-F Wang and B. T. Easton, “Bats, Civets, and the Emergence of SARS,” in J. E. Childs, J. S. Mackenzie, and J. A. Richt, eds., Wildlife and Emerging Zoonotic Diseases, Berlin: Springer, 2007, p. 334. pangolin scales: “Pangolins: Hong Kong finds ‘record’ haul of scale in shipping container,” BBC News, Feb. 1, 2019. “These animals were sent”: Kangpeng Xiao, “Isolation and Characterization of 2019-mCoV-like Coronavirus from Malayan Pangolins,” bioRxiv preprint, Feb. 20, 2020.

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

The second is that humans, either through their changing social and cultural behaviors, or through their impact on the environment and animal and insect ecologies, exert powerful evolutionary pressures on microparasites. Sometimes, these pressures select for a particularly virulent strain of the parasite. At other times, they present the parasite with an opportunity to colonize a new host and extend its ecologic range. This is a particular risk in the case of zoonotic diseases bridged by rodent and insect vectors, such as plague, yellow fever, and dengue. However, it was realized that in an era of increasing globalization, it was also true of other zoonoses that were not nearly as mobile. In particular, it was argued, AIDS would not have been able to escape Africa had humans not changed the rules of “viral traffic.”

…

., 117–18 Wolbach, Burt, 35 Wolbachia bacteria, 351 Womey, Guinea, 291 World Bank, cash fund for resource-poor countries, 366 World Health Organization (WHO), 4n, 11, 165, 177, 221, 232, 247, 250, 253, 342, 366–67 adds “Disease X” to list of potential pandemic threats, 365–66 Africa office, 336 Africa Regional Office (AFRO), 284 Communicable Diseases Division, 257, 336 complacency of, 365 decision instrument of, 334–35 declares Ebola a pheic, 303–5 dengue and, 322 Division of Emerging and Other Communicable Diseases, 290 Ebola and, 283–84, 293, 296–97, 299, 301–2, 303–5, 307–9, 311–12, 335–36, 365, 414n Ebola Interim Assessment Panel, 312 fear propagated by alerts, 274 Global Influenza Program, 244 Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), 257, 274, 284 Global Program on AIDS, 222 global travel alert for SARS, 250, 251, 265, 266, 274 influenza vaccination program, 247 International Health Regulations, 312 mass immunization campaigns of, 226 Mexican swine flu and, 368 SARS and, 257, 259–61, 273–75, 283 Zika and, 334–38 Zika emergency committee, 336–38 World War I, 7, 15, 17–19, 23–26, 28–29, 47, 61–62 Worobey, Michael, 224, 232–33 Writebol, Nancy, 300, 302, 303 Wu Lien-Teh, 77–79 X. cheopis, 385n Yale University, 6 Yambuku, Zaire, 223, 286, 289, 290, 305, 313, 314 Yap islanders, 326–27, 327n yellow fever, 41–42, 143, 280, 282, 320–21, 325, 335, 340, 347, 359, 362 Yemen, cholera in, 342 Yeoh Eng-kiong, 253 Yersin, Alexandre, 68 Yersinia pestis, 68, 72, 73, 78–79, 80, 82, 99, 150 Yi Guan, 246–47, 248, 270, 273 York Central Hospital, 263 Young, George, 83 Young, James, 264 Zabolotny, Danilo, 384n Zaire, 221, 221–22 AIDS in, 232 Ebola in, 282–83, 286, 289, 314, 315, 364 Zaire ebolavirus, 281, 286, 287, 289–90, 315, 410n Zika, 3, 12, 361 aborted births and, 344 classified as flavivirus, 325–26 climate and, 346–47 conspiracy theories and, 345–46 contraception and, 356–57 control measures for, 340–41, 351–52 dengue and, 330–31, 347–48 diagnostic tests for, 328 environmental causes and factors, 346–47 GBS and, 327–31, 338, 341, 343 immunity to, 326n, 327n lack of data about, 346 lack of diagnostic tests for, 332–33 lack of knowledge about, 324–25, 337, 348 latency and slow onset of, 363 neglect of, 343, 356–57 no longer considered pheic, 341 other arboviruses and, 347–48 panic about, 338–41 as pheic, 337–38, 361 phylogenetic analysis of, 342–43 rare reporting of, 326 rise through microbial threat rankings, 335–38 rumors about, 327, 332, 344, 345–46 sexual transmission of, 339, 343 similarities to other arboviruses, 326 social and environmental conditions and, 337, 342–43, 346–47, 356 strains of, 342–43 symptoms of, 318–19, 326 transmission of, 337, 342–43, 349–51 as Trojan horse, 347 unanswered questions about, 342–43 vaccines against, 341 vector-control strategies for, 351 Zika forest, 325 ZMapp, 299, 300, 315 zoes, 288 zoology, 7 zoonotic diseases, 12–13, 68. See also animals, as disease vectors; specific diseases; specific viruses Zuckerberg, Mark, 366 ALSO BY MARK HONIGSBAUM A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830–1920 Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria Valverde’s Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure Copyright © 2019 by Mark Honigsbaum All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

In June 2017 health authorities in New Mexico, in the south-western United States, announced that three people had been diagnosed with the disease in the previous month alone. This is a marked uptick for a country that records around seven cases a year nationwide, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The plague Source: WHO Zoonotic diseases such as the plague, Ebola and avian flu – which are generally carried by animals – are extremely hard to eradicate. The plague is caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which infects fleas, which in turn live mainly on rodents. In Europe, those fleas lived mostly on black rats. In America’s south-west, the site of most cases observed in the rich world, the fleas have shifted to rural squirrels and prairie dogs.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

One recent study’s findings “suggest that global changes in the mode and intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.” A 2020 workshop on biodiversity and pandemics concludes that “conservation of protected areas, and measures that reduce unsustainable exploitation of high biodiversity regions will reduce the wildlife-livestock-human contact interface and help prevent the spillover of novel pathogens.” The risks of zoonotic disease strengthen the case for living in compact urban spaces that do not encroach on the habitats of the wild. There have been fledgling attempts to put together lists of unsafe practices, and this should continue.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Instead, it was a pandemic that appeared and changed our lives overnight. In the winter of 2022, when we were finishing this book, it was not possible to say for sure that Covid-19 had been transmitted to humans from other animals, in this case bats. There are still uncertainties. What we do know, however, is that most pandemics do come from animals; they are zoonotic diseases. In fact, 75 per cent of all new infectious diseases originate from wildlife. Natural habitats should work as a protecting shield, but once you strip back too much of that natural barrier we are exposed to increasing levels of risk. So maybe the coronavirus did spread from animals to humans, or maybe it did not.

…

See individual name and type of event weathering, enhanced, 237 well to wheel emissions, 268 West African Monsoon Shift 38 West Antarctic Ice Sheet 38, 39 wetlands, 96, 236, 245, 253, 346, 416 wheat, 149, 250, 254, 342, 343 white supremacy, 162, 163, 391, 400 wildfires, 50, 51, 62, 96–8, 102–5, 104, 130–31, 133, 193, 218, 314, 378–9, 415, 432 Wilkes Basin East Antarctica 38 willow ptarmigan, 114 willow warbler, 113 wind patterns, 58, 81–2 wind power, 28, 174, 220, 222, 224–5, 225, 226, 227, 228, 268, 270, 280, 297, 343–6, 376, 388, 431; offshore, 220, 228, 343–4, 345, 346 wolves, 9, 103, 174, 349, 350 women, climate crisis and, 172, 176, 177, 309, 398–9, 402–4 wood fuel burning, 4, 92, 100, 102, 121, 156, 216, 224, 225, 226, 229, 233 woolly rhinoceroses, 9 World Bank, 167, 306, 376; Groundswell Report Part II, 187 World Economic Forum, Davos, 378 World Health Organization (WHO), 134, 135; Health Emergency Programme, 133; Special Report on Climate Change and Health, 136 Wounded Knee, US, 387 Y Yellow fever, 143 Yucatàn Peninsula, 417 Z Zika virus, 143, 145 zinc, 149, 150, 151 zombie fires, 379 zoonotic disease, 133 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Illustration Credits 1: ‘Global Average Temperature 1850–2020’ adapted for 2017–21 from ‘Changes over time of the global sea surface temperature as well as air temperature over land’ by Robert Rohde, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2020.

1491 by Charles C. Mann

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Gary Taubes, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, land tenure, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, phenotype, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, stem cell, technological determinism, trade route, zoonotic diseases

In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.

…

Before the Pleistocene, the Americas had three species of horse and at least two camels that might have been ridden; other mammals could have been domesticated for meat and milk. Had they survived, the consequences would have been huge. Not only would domesticated animals have changed Indian societies, they might have created new zoonotic diseases. Absent the extinctions, the encounter between Europe and the Americas might have been equally deadly for both sides—a world in which both hemispheres experienced catastrophic depopulation. PALEO-INDIAN MIGRATION ROUTES North America, 10,000 B.C. Researchers had previously noted the temporal coincidence between the paleo-Indians’ arrival and the mass extinction, but they didn’t believe that small bands of hunters could wreak such ecological havoc.

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

The industrialization of the past few centuries has pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to put the world on track to dangerous global warming. At the same time, a sixth mass extinction3 is becoming more likely as humans continue to encroach into nature to build more homes, new railways, and entire new cities—simultaneously increasing the risks of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19.4 All of this means that economic recovery needs to be greener if climate change, biodiversity loss and future pandemics are to be avoided. But the problem with measuring economic activity using GDP is that it rewards traditional, fossil fuel-powered economic development. In contrast, greener development takes longer and cannot be achieved in the time it takes for governments to sanction what are called ‘shovel-ready’ projects that can deliver faster growth.

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

In 2005… as a threat: Mark Henderson, “End of Sars as a deadly threat,” Times of London, February 21, 2009, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/end-of-sars-as-a-deadly-threat-nz3ll7tqzsz. 13. But, said virologists… humans were: L. F. Wang and B. T. Eaton, “Bats, Civets and the Emergence of SARS,” Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology Wildlife and Emerging Zoonotic Diseases: The Biology, Circumstances and Consequences of Cross-Species Transmission, (2007): 325–44), doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70962-6_13. 14. Also, that year… markets: Zhang Feng, “Does SARS virus still exist in the wild?” China Daily, February 23, 2005, www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-02/23/content_418481.htm. 15.

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

This delayed the response of many governments, but civil society groups, led first and foremost by people infected with HIV, demanded action and step by step moved the world’s governments, although after costly delays. Impressively, the scientific community sprang quickly into action, making rapid and fundamental discoveries about the nature of the virus, the causes of disease, and the ways to fight both. Within roughly a decade of the identification of HIV as a new zoonotic disease, scientists discovered a number of antiviral medicines that could turn the HIV infection from a nearly certain deadly ailment to a chronic and controlled infection. In these breakthroughs and the subsequent distribution of the new medicines, globalization played a huge role. The science of discovery was global, with new scientific knowledge moving rapidly across all continents.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, dual-use technology, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zoonotic diseases

., “A CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Drive System Targeting Female Reproduction in the Malaria Mosquito Vector Anopheles gambiae,” Nature Biotechnology 34 (2016): 78–83. eliminated certain agricultural pests through North and Central America: L. Alphey et al., “Sterile-Insect Methods for Control of Mosquito-Borne Diseases: An Analysis,”Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases 10 (2010): 295–311. field trials have already commenced in Malaysia, Brazil, and Panama: L. Alvarez, “A Mosquito Solution (More Mosquitoes) Raises Heat in Florida Keys,” New York Times, February 19, 2015. it would have spread genes encoding CRISPR, along with the yellow-body trait: “Gene Intelligence,” Nature 531 (2016): 140.

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting by Giles Yeo

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, delayed gratification, Drosophila, Easter island, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, nudge theory, post-truth, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, twin studies, Wall-E, zoonotic diseases

The rapid increase in population density enabled by farming also resulted in a huge increase in infectious disease.10 Diseases like measles, which, in the past, would have occurred in isolated nomadic pockets and then fizzled out, now had whole villages and towns of warm bodies, coughing, sneezing and spewing all manner of fluids, to aid their propagation. In addition, domestication brought large numbers of animals into close proximity with humans for the first time, allowing so-called ‘zoonotic’ diseases to jump between animals and humans. (These include common diseases such as the flu and chicken pox, to ones that cause more alarm like HIV and Ebola.) Yet the advantages of agriculture to the growth and proliferation of our species were just too great, and so humans, flexible as we are, eventually adapted.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

Therefore, throughout history, when societies achieved breakthroughs in farming that enabled the growth of an urban population, the initial spread of urbanization was often set back by bouts of infectious diseases. Third, shifting patterns of human settlements bring societies into new contacts with animal species that harbor infectious diseases that can then mutate and jump to human populations. The result can be a zoonotic disease, meaning an infectious disease transferred from an animal population to the human population. The AIDS epidemic is such a zoonosis. Careful genetic reconstruction of the history of AIDS suggests that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, is a mutation of a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) carried by chimpanzees.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

But most persuasively, detailed genetic analyses of the pathogen show a pattern of descent from prior bat coronaviruses and of randomly occurring genetic mutations that are not compatible with deliberate genetic engineering.72 However, it is very difficult to totally exclude the possibility of an accidental release of a naturally occurring pathogen that was collected from bats and then taken to the lab for study. But since we know of many examples of zoonotic diseases leaping to humans in the normal course of events, including SARS-1, the balance of probabilities, at least to me and most experts, still leans heavily toward a chance move of a naturally occurring pathogen. Another early dubious theory was that the virus was somehow spread by 5G cell phone towers.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

Foragers like the Ju/’hoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic diseases, despotism and war, it was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange or distribute, the more miserable angels of our nature took over. But extreme inequality was not an immediate and organic consequence of our ancestors’ transition to farming.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

Shi and her team at the Wuhan Institute have never explained what happened to the novel coronavirus RaBtCoV/4991 over the years it was stored in the laboratory, but some of the gaps have been filled in by a British scientist who is one of their close collaborators. Manchester-born Peter Daszak had been working alongside Shi’s team hunting down viruses in Chinese caves for 15 years as part of his role as president of the New York-based wildlife and conservation charity EcoHealth Alliance. He had first become interested in zoonotic diseases – those that jump from animals to humans – when he studied parasites during his zoology degree at the University of North Wales. Ever since the Sars outbreak of 2002–03 he has been visiting China several times a year to research coronaviruses, and he is a fierce defender of the Wuhan Institute, dismissing all suggestions that Covid-19 could have leaked from a laboratory.

Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

The PREDICT program spent more than $200 million to train about five thousand scientists dispersed across the world, with many working in regions where new infections were most likely to emerge, including Africa and parts of Asia. The effort aimed to join the researchers together in a global hunt for new zoonotic diseases.104 It helped build new capacities for monitoring threats in resource constrained nations. Like a lot of our pandemic planning, the creation of this program was triggered by fears surrounding the emergence of the H5N1 bird flu in 2005.105 Over its first ten years, PREDICT funded about sixty labs that became part of an ambitious global alliance to find viruses in animals that had the potential to leap into humans.

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

A closer connection with former prey species brought some unexpected passengers, not all of them benign. Measles is so closely related to the cattle disease Rinderpest that it almost certainly developed in the context of cattle domestication. Many of the diseases that still affect us today are zoonotic, diseases that pass from one species to another. Salmonella and flu pass from domesticated fowl to humans. Some other diseases probably come from undomesticated animals. The most likely origin of HIV is in a similar condition endemic to some populations of African monkeys. And many human and animal pathogens are new, results of random mutations that gave them an evolutionary advantage at our expense.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

It was no surprise, therefore, when French president Macron continued to emphasize the importance of Europe moving toward greater “strategic autonomy” even after Biden won the U.S. election.21 PREPARING FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC Each year, between two and five new zoonotic viruses are discovered that have jumped from animals to humans.22 As the world grows more urban, as deforestation further displaces animals from their natural habitat, and with meat very much a part of global supply chains, the chances of another major pandemic will only accelerate.23 In the years ahead, shifting climatic zones will also force animals out of their habitats and into greater contact with people (thus increasing the risk of zoonotic diseases) and expand the range of mosquitoes and other sources of vector-borne infectious diseases. Meanwhile, regardless of what the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic was (and our view is that there is simply not enough evidence as of this writing to conclude one way or the other), the risk of future lab accidents is real and must also be addressed.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

I won’t pull any punches—I think that its invention was one of the all-time human blunders, up there with, say, the New Coke debacle and the Edsel. Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leading humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do, namely living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably the unequal distribution of surplus, generating socioeconomic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies.