It should be of no surprise to know that as I rearrange bookshelves, getting rid of things I no longer need or want I run across books that were an important part of my life, such as this small volume by Stuart Hill, Emerging Infectious Diseases published in 2006 (Pearson/Benjamin Cummings, ISBN-0-8053-3955-8). This small volume was dropped off for me by my Pearson rep (I used Pearson textbooks for two of my classes) thinking that I would be interested in it, since I was interested in epidemics and pandemics.
This slim volume covered all of the “interesting” diseases at the time, including two diseases caused by coronaviruses. The first was SARS-CoV which jumped from civet cats to humans, the other was a SARS-CoV that jumped from bats. Both originally occurred in wild food markets in Guangdong Province, China.
But this little book also covered HIV/AIDS, Hantavirus, Dengue fever, Ebola, Lyme disease, MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staph. aureus) and VRSA (Vancomysin-resistant Staph. aureus), multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis and influenza (in great detain). All of these were considered “Emergent Infectious Diseases,” and introduced to the journal Emergent Infectious Disease published by the CDC. This book and the CDC journal were extremely useful to me in teaching from then until I retired in 2019.
In Human Anatomy and Physiology in the section on immunology I covered the common cold and some of the 120 or so viruses causing them (mostly coronaviruses), but I also stressed the importance of understanding HIV/AIDS and influenza, two viruses that had impacted humanity tremendously in the 1900s. It was disturbing to be teaching during the most recent ebola outbreak in west Africa, and I interestingly opened my TED talk discussion on pandemics mentioning the 2003 SARS pandemic.
The his 2006 book, Hill states: “…approximately 170,000 Americans annually [will die] over the next ten years [2007-2017]. “…and it is expected that SARS-like global epidemics will be more commonplace.”
Clearly nobody anticipated the re-emergence of a SARS virus at the end of 2019 that as of 25 August 2021 resulted in 4.5 million deaths globally and 650 thousand in the USA. Clearly worse than the earlier expectation of 170, 000 deaths annually due to all emerging infectious diseases,
As always I will continue to discuss the situation with the pandemic weekly until it is over.
More next timw…
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