Seven Modern Plagues: and How We Are Causing Them

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Seven Modern Plagues

and How We Are Causing Them

Seven Modern Plagues

and How We Are Causing Them

Mark Jerome Walters

Washington | Covelo | London

Copyright © 2014 Mark Jerome Walters

First Island Press cloth edition, September 2003

First Island Press paperback edition, August 2004

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Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: mad cow disease, HIV/AIDS, salmonella, Lyme disease, hantavirus, West Nile virus, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, MERS

To my dearest Noelle, Will, and Anna

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The Dark Side of Progress: Mad Cow Disease

2. A Chimp Called Amandine: HIV/AIDS

3. The Travels of Antibiotic Resistance: Salmonella DT104

4. Of Old Growth and Arthritis: Lyme Disease

5. A Spring to Die For: Hantavirus

6. A Virus from the Nile

7. Birds, Pigs, and People: The Rise of Pandemic Flus

Epilogue: MERS-CoV and Beyond

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Preface

The first edition of this book was published more than a decade ago, with warnings that the age of ecodemics had arrived. The years since have only confirmed the suspicion that human activity is behind many of them. Environmental change—whether brought about by agriculture, urbanization, or various technologies—has given rise to entirely new diseases and caused existing ones to expand their range.

New ecodemics alone would more than justify this updated edition. The first influenza pandemic since the Hong Kong flu of 1968 emerged in 2009; a new tick-borne infection appeared in the Midwest; a second novel bird flu was identified in China; and yet a new SARS-like virus recently appeared in the Middle East.

But in addition to emerging diseases, the past decade has produced a host of new information about the six plagues covered in the first edition:

• Chronic wasting disease of deer, covered almost as a footnote in the first edition’s chapter on mad cow disease, has greatly expanded its range—and apparent risks—in the United States.

• Genetic analysis has now pinpointed the origins of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

• New fronts have opened up in the battle against increasing antibiotic resistance. (On the positive side, the US Food and Drug Administration recently began taking more decisive action on the issue.)

• Additional studies have confirmed the link between forest fragmentation and urbanization and the increased risk of Lyme disease.

• A major outbreak of hantavirus in California’s Yosemite National Park in 2012 has renewed scientific interest in that infection.

• In 2012, more than 5,500 infections with West Nile virus were reported—mostly in Texas—making it the worst outbreak since 2003. Research during the past decade has greatly expanded the understanding of the ecology of this virus, including its connection to the American robin.

Disease is a process, not an event. Over the past ten years, the plagues have continued to progress, as has our knowledge of them. The first edition of this book now stands as a snapshot of where we were. This new edition offers a more complete understanding of where we are today and what the future may hold.

Introduction

I first learned of the strange new disease in the city nearly fifteen years ago while reading the New York Times. Just across the East River from my Manhattan office, several elderly victims had been admitted to Flushing Hospital Medical Center in Queens. They had been having trouble walking, were confused, and in some cases were comatose. Several soon died. Nearly a month passed before the affliction was identified as brain inflammation caused by an exotic virus. Before long we learned it was West Nile encephalitis, a disease originally seen in Uganda that was now being found for the first time in the Western Hemisphere.

Cases of the illness soon emerged near where I lived, in northern New Jersey, an hour’s train commute from Manhattan. The idea that a potentially fatal disease almost unheard of there a few months before had suddenly popped up near my home was terrifying. Was this how the Black Death, which wiped out as much as one-third of Europe’s population in the 1300s, or the 1918–1919 Spanish influenza epidemic, which killed at least 20 million people in my parents’ lifetime, began? As a veterinarian, I am familiar with diseases, including some frightening ones. But no amount of medical training had prepared me for new, life-threatening diseases heretofore unknown in my neighborhood.

At the time, I wanted to dismiss West Nile virus as anomalous. Problem was, it wasn’t the first new disease to appear during my lifetime or even in my town—nor would it be the last. Some outbreaks seemed like faraway curiosities, whereas others had become personal, everyday concerns. Lyme disease, which hadn’t even been described until the mid-1970s, was now endemic in Morris County, where I lived. And then there was HIV/AIDS, a disease whose deadly global spread was known to almost everyone, not least of all those of us in the New York City region. Even mad cow disease and other afflictions I knew of only through the scientific literature sometimes seemed only a supermarket or an ill airplane passenger away.

In late 2002, the point was brought home when word came from China that a previously unknown coronavirus had been causing a form of severe acute respiratory syndrome—later known as SARS. This deadly and highly contagious pneumonia was rapidly spread by international air travelers. Within a month almost twenty countries, including the United States and Canada, reported cases.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the outbreak began in Guangdong Province in southern China when dozens of people there began to experience headaches, muscle soreness, and dry coughs that quickly deteriorated into life-threatening pneumonia. Within months, the illness had spread throughout Guangdong, where government authorities, fearing social unrest and the loss of tourism, tried to keep the outbreak secret. No medical statistics were released, and journalists were prohibited from reporting on the deadly epidemic.

In February 2003, Liu Jianlun, a sixty-four-year-old kidney specialist from Zhongshan Hospital in Guangdong, traveled to Hong Kong, where he stayed in room 911 at the Metropole Hotel. He had a fever and had not felt well for five days, but when he began to have trouble breathing, he went to Kwong Wah Hospital in Hong Kong. Suspecting he had contracted the highly infectious illness, he asked to be put in an isolation unit. He died several days later. China’s secret was no more.

By March 2003, Chinese authorities had begun to reveal the extent of the outbreak in Guangdong. But then the disease was already sweeping through Hong Kong, infecting hundreds and killing dozens. It had begun to invade Beijing and other cities. It had also arrived in the United States. The disease spread readily from person to person through coughing, sneezing, and other means. It was also quickly disseminated around the globe by jet aircraft. One traveler flew from Hong Kong to Frankfurt and Munich, then on to London, back to Munich and Frankfurt, and then again to Hong Kong, apparently before even suspecting he had contracted a new disease.

In mid-March, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new virus a worldwide health threat. Strict isolation of suspected cases and extreme precautions by health care workers eventually began to slow the spread in many countries, but the virus remained out of control for weeks in China, where dozens of new cases were reported every day. At the time, epidemiologists suspected that about 7 percent of patients died. Researchers soon learned that the fatality rate, at least in Hong Kong, was closer to 15 percent for those under sixty years of age and more than three times that for those older than sixty. Finally, in May 2004, WHO announced that through quarantine of infected patients and other control measures, the SARS outbreak had been contained.

Genetic analysis suggested that the SARS virus had come from a nonhuman animal. Scientists suspected that the coronavirus was spread by the masked palm civet cat, a weasel-faced tree-dweller native to Asia and consumed as a medicinal in China in the belief that it helps people withstand cold weather. (But bats may have been the original source.) Officials ordered the killing of every civet cat in captivity in southeastern China’s Guangdong Province. The killing of the estimated 10,000 cats would be followed by efforts to trap and eliminate the animals in the wild.

For someone trained as a veterinarian, it is no surprise that diseases frequently jump from other species to humans. Nearly 75 percent of new human diseases discovered over the past few decades are carried by wild or domestic animals. We acquired many ancient diseases from other animals, including smallpox from cattle and, apparently, the common cold from horses.

An enormous reservoir of potentially disease-causing viruses resides in wild animals, with many of these microbes remaining undetected until they suddenly appear on the human horizon. What’s more, when a particular virus exists in both humans and other animals, as opposed to being present only in humans, there is almost no way to eradicate it. The best we can do is identify the animal reservoir and try to protect ourselves by showing a healthy respect for the natural boundaries between that species and us.

All this was not even to mention the super-exotic diseases such as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, which had undergone periodic irruptions among people and some wildlife in Sudan and Zaire during the previous two decades—deadly outbreaks that continue to this day. Infection with the usually fatal Ebola virus causes massive internal hemorrhaging. Barely a decade before West Nile virus broke out in New York, several monkeys infected with Ebola virus were imported into Virginia in what could have led to the first human outbreak of the disease in the United States. Fortunately, quarantine of the animals and rapid identification of the virus prevented its spread to the monkeys’ human caretakers. Still, the evidence was clear: numerous new, sometimes fatal, infectious illnesses were pounding at the door. Some had already made it through.

But hadn’t the surgeon general of the United States proclaimed, way back in the late 1960s, that the time had come when Americans could close the book on infectious diseases? Hadn’t the miracle of modern medicine all but ended the war against pestilence?

In fact, now, nearly four decades later, infectious disease still kills more than one in three people worldwide. The World Health Organization reported in 1999 that diseases that seemed to be subdued . . . are fighting back with renewed ferocity. Some . . . are striking in regions once thought safe from them. Other infections are now so resistant to drugs that they are virtually untreatable. Even the Central Intelligence Agency has expressed concern about the resurgence of infectious disease. In 2000 the CIA predicted that emerging infections will complicate U.S. and global security over the next 20 years . . . endanger U.S. citizens at home and abroad, threaten U.S. armed forces deployed overseas, and exacerbate social and political instability in key countries and regions.

This prediction was partially realized when, in April 2003, an estimated 10,000 residents of Chagugang, a two-hour drive from Beijing, rioted and gutted a building where SARS patients were supposedly to be housed. SARS riots elsewhere in China soon followed.

Scientists tell us that this global rise in infections comprises two general trends. Old diseases once believed to be controlled have resurged and in some cases have sprung up in new regions of the world. In recent years, malaria, an ancient disease, has dramatically increased in many areas, such as East Africa. This mosquito-borne illness kills nearly 2 million people annually. Half of the victims are children under five years of age. Some forms of the disease have become resistant to chloroquine, a mainstay of malaria treatment. The disease is also appearing in places where it was supposedly eliminated. In 2002, a fifteen-year-old boy and a nineteen-year-old woman in Loudoun County, Virginia, contracted malaria from mosquitoes near their home—the first time in at least twenty years that malaria had been found in both humans and mosquitoes in an American community. In some areas of the globe, the increase in malaria has been linked to a warming global climate and degradation of forests, which have given mosquitoes more places to breed.

In 2002 the tropical paradise of Maui, Hawai’i, reported its first case of dengue fever in more than fifty years. Transmitted by a mosquito bite, this virus causes a sudden high fever, severe headaches, joint and muscle pain, vomiting, and rash. It is sometimes fatal.

Perhaps like many people, I was tempted to dismiss these increases as artifacts of better detection methods. Weren’t investigators simply picking up on diseases that had eluded our older, cruder methods of surveillance? Unfortunately, the facts do not support this optimism.

A second, equally ominous trend is the emergence of new diseases, of which WHO had identified more than thirty between 1980 and 1997—and many more by 2013. That list doesn’t even include many earlier ones, such as rotavirus infection, the already mentioned Lyme disease (now the most common disease in the United States transmitted by a tick or other vector), Legionnaire’s disease, Ebola virus and hantavirus infections, and toxic shock syndrome—to mention a few. In 1995 this plethora led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create an entirely new journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, which has since published 10,000 articles.

In 2009 swine flu swept the globe, the first pandemic since the Hong Kong flu in 1968–1969. Continuing to lurk in the background is the highly deadly (but not contagious, yet) bird flu, H5N1. In 2013 yet another variety of bird flu, caused by the similarly lethal H5N7 virus, emerged in China.

In 2011, two men on farms in northwestern Missouri came down with a severe illness that caused them to be hospitalized for a week with high fever, diarrhea, nausea, muscle pain, erratic blood counts, and liver problems. After intensive investigation by CDC and other scientists, a new disease carried by a tick was identified. The scientists who identified it called it Heartland virus.

The following year, in 2012, the SARS-like MERS-CoV virus burst onto the scene in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. And in 2013, the CDC released a report detailing the rise of new antibiotic-resistant bacteria in medical settings, which Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the CDC, called nightmare bacteria.

While antibiotics, better sanitation, and other measures have lowered the percentage of deaths from infection worldwide since 1900, such improvements have hardly closed the book on infectious disease. If anything, we are in the process of writing entirely new volumes.

This emergent-disease phenomenon is actually more widespread than is at first apparent. Populations of frogs and other amphibians around the globe have declined dramatically since the 1980s, partly because of novel infectious diseases. Plagues are striking a wide range of other species, including crayfish, seals, honeybees, wolves, gorillas, prairie dogs, ferrets, penguins, snails, snakes, wild dogs, salamanders, pelicans, and kangaroos, to name a few. Infections threaten to drive some species to extinction. Ebola hemorrhagic fever is rapidly wiping out many of the world’s remaining wild gorillas. A cancer epidemic, apparently caused by a virus, threatens many species of sea turtle worldwide. Chronic wasting disease, a brain-destroying affliction similar to mad cow disease, is spreading among wild deer and elk in the western United States and could eventually spread throughout white-tailed deer in the East.

We’ve all heard some of these accounts, but our understanding tends to be based on piecemeal news, with little sense of an encompassing story. In some ways we are getting the least important part of the picture. Media reports usually describe isolated battles against new diseases and rarely tell us the larger ecological story of which many new afflictions are a part. The larger story is not simply that humans and other animals are falling victim to new diseases; it is that we are causing or exacerbating many of these ecodemics.

Intensive modern agriculture, clear-cutting of forests, global climate change, decimation of many predators that once kept disease-carrying smaller animals in check, and other environmental changes have all contributed to the increase. This is not even to mention increased global travel and commerce, which can rapidly spread many diseases. This view is not an alarmist’s leap of the imagination; it is quickly gaining ground as evolutionary and epidemiological fact. Noted scientist Peter Daszak, executive director of the