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Book Report : Pox Americana and Virus X

Introduction

There are many books written which focuses of those deadly diseases that occur in the world. Several of them are written during olden times wherein there are no medicines and high tech facilities to cure for their illness and to detect the disease. One example of these books written was the Pox American and the Virus X both centered on a particular disease.

Pox Americana

Many books have been written about smallpox, but few have this volume’s scholarly focus. Fenn (history, George Washington Univ.) relies heavily on primary documents to illustrate the disease’s devastating impact on the political and military history of North America during the Revolutionary War. Excerpts from diaries, letters, presidential papers, and church and burial records provide first-hand accounts of the spread of this disease (Martin, 2003). The result is an extensive discussion of the role of smallpox in the Colonial era, but the book’s main strength is in the detailed analysis of smallpox among Native Americans, from Mexico to Canada. Fenn’s study of the historical horrors of this devastating disease nicely complements Jonathan Tucker’s Scourge, which considers what the future may be like if smallpox returns. Well-informed students of the American Revolutionary era have long known that virulent, localized outbreaks of smallpox played havoc with soldiers and civilians alike during the years of the War for American Independence. The devastation wrought by this killer disease among Continental and militia troops who invaded Canada in 1775-1776, for example, or among African-American slaves who were in the vicinity of Yorktown, Virginia, at the time of the siege of Lord Cornwallis’s army in 1781, have received modest amounts of attention (Martin, 2003). What scholars have not previously known, however, is how incredibly widespread and horribly destructive this smallpox epidemic really was. This is the subject that Elizabeth Fenn, after extensive and impressive research, addresses in this valuable new investigation of the smallpox virus, Variola major, and its rapacious spread to all corners of the North American continent between 1775 and 1782. Fenn first looks into the ghastly, highly contagious characteristics of smallpox. She points out that from the 1490s to the 1770s, as many as twenty-three smallpox epidemics occurred in various parts of North America. Especially hard hit were Native Americans, but Euro-Americans were not wholly immune (Martin, 2003). Over time European settlers learned to isolate the sick and even perform inoculations by making incisions in their skin and then rubbing in Variola-related matter drawn from the pustules of persons enduring milder cases. A key aspect of the author’s presentation focuses on describing the disease’s capricious journey across the landscape. Lurking almost everywhere were complex conditioning factors related to the Columbian exchange, including the introduction of horses and European-style weapons. Indians resident on the Great Plains, for example, could ride, trade, raid, and make war in all directions–and also spread Variola wherever they went (Martin, 2003). The author, when the evidence seems clear cut, identifies those peoples, such as the Shoshones of the Great Plains, who carried Variola into the midst of other population groups during the 1775-82 plague. Fenn’s purpose, however, is not to cast blame for blame’s sake, particularly with respect to Native peoples who had little comprehension of the disease. The real culprit, the author indicates, lay in the heightened interaction of diverse peoples across the continent, a reflection of European colonization and missionization efforts as well as proliferating networks of commercial exchange that brought Native Americans into sustained contact with Euro-American and European traders.

Virus X

Virus X by Frank Ryan is a real-life horror book wherein exotic killers such as Ebola and Necrotizing Fasciitis rub elbows with more familiar, if no less potentially lethal diseases like tuberculosis. Here, Ryan constructs a well-researched and well-written study that reads more like a thriller than a science book. The heroes in his book are the doctors, nurses, and patients on the frontlines of plague as well as the researchers at laboratories B (The Net Net, 2001). The enemies are the myriad new viruses and virulent new strains of old viruses that are emerging in ever greater numbers as this century wears to a close. Dr. Ryan’s answer for why there are many plagues that are ravaging the world these days is simple but chilling: a huge explosion in population and the resulting destruction of habitats that has brought human beings into contact with aggressive viruses that onece lived beyond our reach and at the same time our global transportation systems spread them.Virus X is not the first book to raise such issues but it’s a comprehensive one, making for gripping, and frightening reading. Furthermore, the book is an intelligent and writerly book that traces the phenomenon of emerging viruses and proposes an evolutionary explanation. Ryan uses evolutionary biology to help explain some of the sudden outbreaks of extremely lethal organisms that we are seeing today (The Net Net, 2001). The book overlaps in themes, but it takes a somewhat more distant view, providing larger contexts for the themes of dwindling budgets and rising human vulnerability to disease. For all Virus X’s perspective on the laboratory aspect of epidemiology, it has a decidedly clinical focus, which Ryan describes with appropriate scope — clinical medicine involves the laboratory, but it also encompasses the experience of the physician, the local availability of materials, the willingness or ability of patients to comply with treatment, the funding environment, the political landscape, and the media (The Net Net, 2001). While the growing resistance to antibiotics and the tabloid fare of “flesh-eating bugs” help to show this, nowhere is it more apparent than in the case of HIV, whose very structure — HIV-2 is fundamentally the same as simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) — brought political correctness into play as well. Still, the basis of effective clinical treatment is effective treatment, and the action of Virus X is never very far from the causes of the diseases it discusses. Sin Nombre hantavirus, at once the most recent and least mysterious of the viruses discussed at length in this book, provides the clearest example of both the multidisciplinary approach needed to contain epidemic disease and the argument that Ryan offers to explain the apparent explosion of such outbreaks: aggressive symbiosis. Viruses and bacteria are under tremendous evolutionary pressures, and their numbers, mutation rates, and ability to recombine genetic information allow them to develop stunning arrays of strategies very rapidly. As Ryan shows, this has implications beyond resistance to antibiotics (The Net Net, 2001). Virus X is a thought-provoking book that suggests that the dreaded doomsday scenario is, for all practical purposes, already here: in a highly mobile population concentrated in large cities, only a few “trespasses” may be sufficient to disseminate an aggressively symbiotic organism. Like HIV. And clinically, it’s not about “slate-wipers”, it’s about human suffering and the complacency that allows it to continue. The exigencies of the science involved are nicely interwoven with the larger clinical picture, particularly the reduction in funding available for epidemic surveillance — and for training of the next generation of epidemiologists (The Net Net, 2001). Virus X, in spite of its dire message, is an eminently readable book and certainly among the best offerings in this area. Knowledgeable and a good writer besides, Ryan keeps even the most often told of these stories interesting with his good narrative sense and obvious respect for the participants. And in aggressive symbiosis, he describes one of the most intriguing explanations in the popular literature for why viruses seem so much more present and dangerous today, going far beyond sentimental arguments about living in peace with the earth or vague anxieties about “life out of balance.” Virus X is a exceptional book, well conceived and artfully executed.

Bibliography:

Martin, J. (2003). Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. Journal Article: Journal of Social History, Vol. 37

The Net Net Read Me (2001). Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues Out of the Present and Into the Future. Book Review: Caitlin Burke