Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. By: Mark Honigsbaum. The story of viruses and humanity is a story of fear and ignorance, of grief and heartbreak, and of great bravery and sacrifice.
Michael Oldstone tells all these stories as he illuminates the history of the devastating diseases that have tormented humanity, focusing mostly on the most famous viruses. For this revised edition, Oldstone includes discussions of new viruses like SARS, bird flu, virally caused cancers, chronic wasting disease, and West Nile. Viruses, Plagues, and History paints a sweeping portrait of humanity's long-standing conflict with our unseen viral enemies. By: Michael B.
It shows in unprecedented detail how governments in China, the UK, and the US not only failed to protect their citizens from the threat of the disease but actively conspired to put their own political and economic ideologies above the lives of ordinary people. By: Dylan Howard , and others. By the summer of , the second wave struck as a highly contagious and lethal epidemic and within weeks exploded into a pandemic, an illness that travels rapidly from one continent to another.
It would impact the course of the war, and kill many millions more soldiers than warfare itself. By: Albert Marrin. The emergence of strange new diseases is a frightening problem that seems to be getting worse.
In this age of speedy travel, it threatens a worldwide pandemic. The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. David Quammen tracks this subject around the world. By: David Quammen. In the winter of , at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as million people worldwide.
It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and marked the first collision between modern science and epidemic disease. By: John M. An inside account of the fight to contain the world's deadliest diseases - and the panic and corruption that make them worse.
The Next Pandemic is a firsthand account of disasters like anthrax, bird flu, and others - and how we could do more to prevent their return. It is both a gripping story of our brushes with fate and an urgent lesson on how we can keep ourselves safe from the inevitable next pandemic. By: Ali Khan , and others. This comprehensive and gripping narrative, which received the Pulitzer Prize for history, covers all the challenges, characters, and controversies in America's relentless struggle against polio.
Funded by philanthropy and grassroots contributions, Salk's killed-virus vaccine and Sabin's live-virus vaccine began to eradicate this dreaded disease. By: David M. In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind's vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted - and often permanently altered - global politics, race relations, and family structures while spurring innovation in medicine, religion, and the arts.
By: Laura Spinney. In , the U. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year.
With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease. By: Molly Caldwell Crosby. In December , a young boy in a tiny West African village contracted the deadly Ebola virus. The virus spread to his relatives, then to neighboring communities, then across international borders. The world's first urban Ebola outbreak quickly overwhelmed the global health system and threatened to kill millions. In an increasingly interconnected world in which everyone is one or two flights away from New York or London or Beijing, even a localized epidemic can become a pandemic.
Ebola's spread sounded global alarms that the next killer outbreak is right around the corner. By: Reid Wilson. In , the world was still in the throes of the Great War, the deadliest conflict in human history at that point, but while World War I would be a catastrophic war surpassed only by World War II, an unprecedented influenza outbreak that same year inflicted casualties that would make both wars pale in comparison.
By: Charles River Editors. In The Viral Storm , award-winning biologist Nathan Wolfe tells the story of how viruses and human beings have evolved side by side through history; how deadly viruses like HIV, swine flu, and bird flu almost wiped us out in the past; and why modern life has made our species vulnerable to the threat of a global pandemic.
The post above me does make a valid point… sometimes it is hard to draw the line between life and death. However, the above post also utilizes the example of human beings: complex organisms made up of many organ systems and thousands upon thousands of cells.
Viruses are not nearly this complex; therefore, in my opinion, the method of determining whether they are dead or alive is also much less complex and cannot be put on par with a human being. I do not believe that viruses are alive. Although they are very parasitic in nature i.
They rely on a host to be able to do the one thing that is common among all living things, metabolize. Their inability to metabolize without a host makes them nonliving. I think that viruses are not alive. They are simply living off of the host they infect and can not function alone.
At first, I likened them to parasites which they are in a sense , but they differ from living parasites in that t hey can not hold their own metabolic processes or reproduce without a host. So, viruses, I think, are not alive. Although viruses are not capable of many of the most basic functions of all other organisms, I believe it is still reasonable to refer to them as a life form.
This evaluation depends entirely on their use of the genetic code to propagate and evolve. Since life is based around this universal language of DNA, any unit which plays an otherwise unfulfilled role in genetic development could be considered living. It is not necessary for the living, changing DNA to possess its own reproductive machinery. DEspite the fact that they evolve to some extent and have gentic material RNA or DNA depending on the particular virus , like most parasites, viruses are entirely dependent on their hosts, without which they can neither carry out metabolic activities nor reproduce, abilities which are intrinsic to living organisms.
I do think viruses should be considered to be alive. Obviously they live in a very simplistic way, but it seems to me that they show too many defining characteristics of life to be dismissed as lifeless. The fact that viruses have a purpose — to reproduce and multiply — is what matters, not how they achieve that goal. There is nothing that is not alive in this world to my knowledge that actively tries to reproduce and thrive.
I wanted to say something very similar to Rachel Trenchard above. I will add to what Rachel said, that we could even look at the entire human race, how we interact with each other and with resources in the globe, and we see that we are in a way similar to parasites of the earth. For viruses their earth might be limited to the insides of hosts, plants, humans, animals, etc. Very often, we say the basis of human behavior is in reproduction.
I would say these are some strong reasons they should be considered alive. I think that viruses are alive. One commonality among all living things is the necessity to interact with the environment. All life processes, whether directly or indirectly, are carried out with aide from an outer environment. As humans, we may seem like independent life forms, but absolutely none of our life processes would be possible without exchange with our surroundings, starting with the simple necessity of sunlight.
From this perspective, viruses could be the smartest life form; reducing their existence to nothing but reproduction, which is the most important process of an organism. Using this logic I think that the fact that under some circumstance a virus can perform the most basic properties of life —to reproduce and adapt-is enough to consider it alive. They dont grow or develop, rather they are assembled and sometimes undergo biochemical steps of maturation.
Rather than reproduction, we tend to talk about replication. To me the language hints at a non-living, almost mechanical thing. At first glance it may seem as though viruses are alive because they contain the universal genetic code, something that all living things have in common.
In addition, they respond to stimuli and evolve. However, when looking at more of the properties of life, a virus cannot be be deemed alive because it cannot reproduce on its own and it cannot grow and develop fully without a host cell. A possible surprise to most physicians, and perhaps to most evolutionary biologists as well, is that most known viruses are persistent and innocuous, not pathogenic. These viruses have developed many clever ways to avoid detection by the host immune system— essentially every step in the immune process can be altered or controlled by various genes found in one virus or another.
Viruses therefore surely have effects that are faster and more direct than those of external forces that simply select among more slowly generated, internal genetic variations.
And unique genes of viral origin may travel, finding their way into other organisms and contributing to evolutionary change. Data published by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium indicate that somewhere between and genes present in bacteria and in the human genome are absent in well-studied organisms—such as the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae , the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans —that lie in between those two evolutionary extremes.
Some researchers thought that these organisms, which arose after bacteria but before vertebrates, simply lost the genes in question at some point in their evolutionary history.
Others suggested that these genes had been transferred directly to the human lineage by invading bacteria. My colleague Victor DeFilippis of the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute of the Oregon Health and Science University and I suggested a third alternative: viruses may originate genes, then colonize two different lineages—for example, bacteria and vertebrates.
A gene apparently bestowed on humanity by bacteria may have been given to both by a virus. In fact, along with other researchers, Philip Bell of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and I contend that the cell nucleus itself is of viral origin.
The advent of the nucleus— which differentiates eukaryotes organisms whose cells contain a true nucleus , including humans, from prokaryotes, such as bacteria—cannot be satisfactorily explained solely by the gradual adaptation of prokaryotic cells until they became eukaryotic. Rather the nucleus may have evolved from a persisting large DNA virus that made a permanent home within prokaryotes.
Some support for this idea comes from sequence data showing that the gene for a DNA polymerase a DNAcopying enzyme in the virus called T4, which infects bacteria, is closely related to other DNA polymerase genes in both eukaryotes and the viruses that infect them.
Patrick Forterre of the University of Paris-Sud has also analyzed enzymes responsible for DNA replication and has concluded that the genes for such enzymes in eukaryotes probably have a viral origin. From single-celled organisms to human populations, viruses affect all life on earth, often determining what will survive.
But viruses themselves also evolve. New viruses, such as the AIDS-causing HIV-1, may be the only biological entities that researchers can actually witness come into being, providing a real-time example of evolution in action. Viruses matter to life. They are the constantly changing boundary between the worlds of biology and biochemistry.
As we continue to unravel the genomes of more and more organisms, the contributions from this dynamic and ancient gene pool should become apparent. Nobel laureate Salvador Luria mused about the viral infl uence on evolution in Already a subscriber?
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