Category: Medicine
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How disease shaped humanity’s past
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by
DISEASE historians have a problem. While examining samples of ancient human DNA, geneticists have come across genes belonging to the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, revealing that it ravaged Eurasia 5000 years ago. That’s nearly 3500 years before the “first plague”, also known as the Justinian plague, after the Roman emperor of the day. What to…
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The modern foundling wheel
WHEN Romina discovered she was pregnant in 2021, she was 39 years old and homeless, without a euro to her name. She did what many a lonely and frightened woman has done throughout history, on learning that she was going to have a baby, and pretended she wasn’t. “If you don’t think about it, it…
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Covid – five years in
ONCE, we all respectfully listened to what epidemiologists said. We queued up for vaccines, observed distancing lines and confidently asked unmasked passengers on public transport to cover their faces. A tyrannical virus ruled over us, and we did everything in our power to limit its ravages… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 9…
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Big brother
IN East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than…
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Covid origins
ANGELA Rasmussen studies the interactions between hosts and pathogens and how they shape disease. Before the pandemic, she worked on the emerging viruses that cause Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Ebola, dengue and avian flu. Then, when Covid-19 erupted, the American virologist, who works at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, was drawn into the…
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Bill Gates on the pandemic
IN 2015, the American technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that humanity wasn’t ready for a pandemic. Seven years on, as the world emerges (hopefully) from a pandemic for which it wasn’t ready, he thinks we have it within our power to make sure this one was the last. There will be more disease outbreaks,…
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From zero to hero
IT was the alt-history, the policy that didn’t get enacted. No-Covid, zero-Covid or elimination aimed to stamp out community transmission of Covid-19 in a given area, rather than just reduce it to “manageable” levels. Most of the world eschewed it, and it got bad press from the start. Only autocratic regimes could pull it off,…
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On pandemics and reciprocity
LAST November, having alerted the world to the new and highly transmissible Omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, South Africa-based scientist Tulio de Oliveira saw that country hit with travel bans. Already smarting at what he saw as wealthier nations’ hoarding of vaccines, antiviral drugs and test reagents, his frustration spilled over. “If the world…