A review of THE COMING PLAGUE: NEWLY EMERGING DISEASES IN A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE by Laurie Garrett, published in 1994. CHAPTER 16: NATURE AND HOMO SAPIENS
The microbes were winning
That humanity had grossly underestimated the microbes was no longer, as the world approached the 21st century, a matter of doubt. The microbes were winning. Arguments among scientists focused on the whys, hows, and whens of an acknowledged threat.
Something had to give
The extraordinary, rapid growth of the Homo sapiens population, coupled with its voracious appetite for planetary dominance and resource consumption, had put every measurable biological and chemical system on earth in a state of imbalance. With nearly 6 billion human beings already crowded onto a planet in 1994 that had been occupied by fewer than 1.5 billion a century earlier, something had to give. That “something” was Nature – all observable biological systems other than Homo sapiens and their domesticated fellow animals. The bulk of human population growth would be in the poorest nations on earth. By the 1990s it was already obvious that the countries that were experiencing the most radical population growths were those confronting the most rapid environmental degradations and worst scales of human suffering.
The pace of the loss was staggering
At Harvard University, Dr. E. O. Wilson was one of the leaders of a worldwide effort to catalog the world’s species and protect as much of the planet’s diversity as possible, estimating that there were 1.4 million known species of terrestrial flora, fauna, and microorganisms on earth in 1992, and perhaps 98.6 million yet to be identified, most of which were living in the world’s rain forests. There the plentiful supply of rain, tropical sunlight, and nutrient-rich soil bred such striking diversity that Wilson found 43 different species of ants living on a single tree in the Amazon. The pace of the loss was staggering – on the order, by UN estimates, of 4.75 million acres annually.
Lyme disease
When ecospheres are severely stressed, certain species of flaura and forna that are best suited to adapt to the changed conditions quickly dominate. Both deforestation and deforestation can give rise to microbial emergence. Such was the case in 1975-76 in the Atlantic seaside town of Lyme, Connecticut where 51 residents came down with what looked like rheumatoid arthritis, dubbed Lyme disease. By 1990 it had surfaced in all 50 states and parts of Western Europe. Most Lyme sufferers lived in wooded areas that were inhabited by common North American feral animals: deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and the like.
The bacteria were transmitted to people by a tick
In 1982, Dr. Allen Steere discovered that Lyme patients were infected with a previously little-studied spirochete bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, showing that many of the dreadful symptoms of the disease were the result of the immune system’s protracted battles with the microbe. The Borrelia bacteria were transmitted to people by a tick, Ixodes dammini. While the tick was happy to feed on Homo sapiens, its preferred lunch was deer blood but getting rid of the deer in a region didn’t eliminate Lyme disease.
Deer, dogs, humans, rodents, and birds carried the insects
The ubiquitous northeastern mouse Peromyscus leucopus was the natural reservoir for the B. burgdorferi bacterium that caused Lyme disease. The mice passed their B. burgdorferi on to the ticks. The two species, rodent and insect, shared the ecology of low scrub brush where the deer grazed, picking up the ticks, which, while feeding on deer blood, passed on the bacteria. Because there were no predators around to keep the deer populations in check, they stepped into suburban front yards where they came in contact with cats and dogs. The territory inhabited by the tick expanded at a steady and rapid rate as deer, pet dogs, humans, rodents, and even some birds carried the insects from the initial outbreak sites. Their invasion, and the epidemic they spawned were new.