It’s hard to keep track at the moment whether swine flu incidence is dramatically rising or significantly falling.
I don’t worry too much either way about these things. I mostly look on media reporting of disease epidemics the same way I do reporting on anything else: spread the panic, keep up the fear.
What is interesting to me though (which I admit I didn’t know until recently) is that apparently all human disease originates from our domestication of animals, from approximately 10,000 years ago onwards.
The reasons for why humans took this path, and the consequences for us of doing so, are detailed in the wonderful What On Earth Happened by Christopher Lloyd. I’d urge anyone to read this book – a highly readable narrative on the history of pretty much everything (a fuller review is for another time).
Further from Wikipedia:
One side effect of domestication has been zoonotic diseases. For example, cattle have given humanity various viral poxes, measles, and tuberculosis; pigs and ducks have given influenza; and horses have given the rhinoviruses. Humans share over sixty diseases with dogs. Many parasites also have their origins in domestic animals. The advent of domestication resulted in denser human populations which provided ripe conditions for pathogens to reproduce, mutate, spread, and eventually find a new host in humans.
Lloyd’s book does a brilliant job of clearly highlighting the cause and effect of human behaviour throughout history. It’s far from sensationalist, but it has made me realise that media reporting on epidemics, global warming and the like are just the tip of the iceberg.
That scares me more than any daily reporting of the swine flu pop charts.
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