William Leith

A deadly box of chemicals

We still don’t have a proper vaccine. And even the world’s expert admits that, having thought deeply about the virus for 20 years, he still ‘knows nothing’

Do you remember the swine flu panic a decade ago? Jeremy Brown, the author of this book, describes it here. In March 2009, 60 people died in Mexico. The cause: a flu-type virus. The Mexican government ‘closed schools, banned public gatherings, and ordered troops to hand out face masks at subway stations’. This flu crossed the border into the United States. The media monitored the outbreak with grim enthusiasm. Soon, people in 74 countries were infected. The WHO ‘declared it a pandemic’.

Or perhaps you don’t remember the swine flu panic of 2009. Not many people do. The main reason I do is that I met an epidemiologist on a train in March of that year; he was having the most intense week of his life. People really thought this swine flu virus, a variant of the H1N1 strain, with components from pig flu, bird flu and human flu, might be the big one. It wasn’t. It infected around a million people. Not many died. Just like ordinary flu, in fact.

I’ve read a few books recently on the subject of epidemics and viral outbreaks; two of the best are Spillover, by the maestro of science writing David Quammen, and Pale Rider, by Laura Spinney, about the 1918 flu pandemic, which really was the big one: somewhere between 50 and 100 million people died.

I’m happy to add Dr Brown’s book to this collection. He is, by the way, director of emergency care research at the US National Institutes of Health. Like Spinney and Quammen, he explains what a virus is, and how it works. He interviews Jeff Taubenberger, also of the NIH, and possibly the world’s top influenza specialist. He also tells us about the fascinatingly gruesome research conducted on the 1918 virus.

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