One headline last week suggested that future pandemics are “a bigger threat than nukes.” Hence, my allusion to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men in my title. Pandemics may or may not be a bigger threat than nuclear war, but the assertion highlights the increasing concern some of those in the medical community have regarding ongoing failed policies in addressing COVID even as a summer surge of cases hits the United States. Our own response and behavior is not only sustaining COVID infections, but also setting the stage for new pandemics.
For example, concern remains that the ongoing “bird flu” infections of cattle will lead to variants capable of being spread human-to-human. It’s worth reiterating that since 2003 half of the 889 people worldwide known to have contracted the virus called H5N1 have died.
While what is called the case fatality rate for COVID is notoriously difficult to estimate—because so many cases have gone unreported—one estimate puts it at 0.7 percent. That means the rate for the small number of bird flu cases in humans is more than 71 times higher than COVID. And, yet there seems to be little effort in the United States to check the spread of bird flu among cattle, let alone poultry. Some 99 million chickens and turkey have been infected since a new “highly pathogenic strain” appeared in early 2022. These developments seem like they should be “hair on fire” events given the potential seriousness of the outcome. Finland is so far the only country to offer bird flu vaccinations for people, in this case, those who work with potentially infected animals.
A third modern plague apparently lurks in the soil, aspergillus fumigatus. This fungus has always been a threat to humans if inhaled, but has been mostly a danger to people with weakened immune systems. Now a multi-drug resistant strain of the fungus has appeared that could boost mortality of those with poor immune function to close to 100 percent should they get infected.
It should come as no surprise that the fungus has become resistant to currently available treatments because farmers have been overusing antifungals.
I have previously written about what are called biosafety level 4 laboratories (the highest level) that “are designed and built to work safely and securely with the most dangerous bacteria and viruses that can cause serious diseases and for which no treatment or vaccines exist.” According to a recent report about such labs around the world:
At the international level, current biorisk management efforts are fragmented across regulatory, public health, and nonproliferation domains with wide variation in the levels of resources and attention devoted to biosafety, biosecurity, and dual-use research oversight. There are few legally-binding requirements in any of these three fields and even fewer mechanisms for ensuring compliance with such requirements.
Whether the COVID virus that continues to sicken millions across the world and degrade their overall health was created in one of these labs and unintentionally carried into the population will never be known for certain. But the poor supervision of laboratories researching highly dangerous pathogens makes a release into human populations an ever-growing danger.
The impression that much of the public has about pandemics is that they are random events over which humans have no control. That is only partly true as the human role in setting the stage for new pandemics grows ever larger—so much so that we may have only ourselves to blame when the next one arrives.
