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Educated

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Tara Westover

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“In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend. He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’.”

CapitalismIdiotCovidEpidemiologySteven PinkerLiberlism
Book:Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century
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“For some reason there is a tendency to assume that one wild animal is a suitable model for another related species, whereas similar evidence would not be acceptable in human or veterinary medicine. For example, Shulaw etal. (1986) developed a serologic test to detect antibodies to Mycobacterium aviumssp. paratuberculosisin white-tailed deer, but determined the validity of the test “in deer” by using samples from infected sika and fallow deer. It is doubtful that a test developed to detect disease in humans would be accepted for use in public health circles, if its validity had been established by using squirrel monkeys and baboons!”

DiseaseWildlifeEpidemiologyWildlife Disease
Author:Gary Wobeser
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“Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7.”

ScienceVirusesEpidemiology
Book:It's Catching: The Infectious World of Germs and Microbes
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“Few diseases have had an impact on human evolution, culture and society on par with malaria. It is one of the oldest documented infectious diseases. Indeed, it has been hypothesised that the protective effect bestowed by a heterozygous sickle cell allele explains its survival to the modern day. As such, malaria has left its footprint on human evolution in a profound way few other diseases have. Yet its true origins were the matter of considerable controversy. The clue is in the name – the prevailing theory until Ross's discovery was that malaria resulted from 'mala aria', that is, 'bad air'. It took the advent of modern evidence-based medical science to challenge this 'miasma theory'. Ross's elucidation of the role of mosquitoes in the lifecycle of malaria has opened up a new subject for epidemiological consideration: the vector-borne disease.”

EvolutionMalariaEpidemiologyCoevolutionMiasma
Book:Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python
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