“The difficulty of predicting precisely doesn’t oblige us to remain blind, unprepared, and fatalistic about emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases. No. The practical alternative to soothsaying is “improving the scientific basis to improve readiness.
The scientific basis” means the understanding of which virus groups to watch, the field capabilities to detect spillovers in remote places before they become regional outbreaks, the organizational capacities to control outbreaks before they become pandemics, plus the laboratory tools and skills to recognize known viruses speedily, to characterize new viruses almost as fast, and to create vaccines and therapies without much delay.
If we can’t predict a forthcoming influenza pandemic or any other newly emergent virus, we can at least be vigilant; we can be well-prepared and quick to respond; we can be ingenious and scientifically sophisticated in the forms of our response.”
— Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
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“There’s not a hope in hell of predicting the nature and timing of the next influenza pandemic. Too many factors vary randomly, or almost randomly, in that system.” 🦠😷
— Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
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Virtual Screening / Q&A – Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché - Annenberg Space for Photography
The Jodi Foster-narrated documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché depicts the take of the female genius who made over 1,000 films at the turn of the century. Join us for a free virtual screening party of this powerful film, then join director Pamela B. Green and co-writer Joan Simon for a special Q&A session.
html energy
If you’re into web design you’ll love the HTML Energy podcast—intimate conversations with folks exploring the creative potential of hand-made websites in our world of stock templates.
LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline. Feel the @htmlenergy
The Gene: An Intimate History weaves together science, history & personal stories for a historical biography of the human genome, while also exploring breakthroughs for diagnosis & treatment of genetic diseases & the complex ethical questions they raise. Mind raising science TV.
Fun fact — one in every four species of mammal is a bat.🦇
“R0 = βN/( α + b + v) In English: The evolutionary success of a bug is directly related to its rate of transmission through the host population and inversely but intricately related to its lethality, the rate of recovery from it, and the normal death rate from all other causes. (The clunky imprecision of that sentence is why ecologists prefer math.) So the first rule of a successful parasite is slightly more complicated than Don’t kill your host. It’s more complicated even than Don’t burn your bridges until after you’ve crossed them. The first rule of a successful parasite is βN/( α + b + v).”
— Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
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“Polio, during its worst years, struck hundreds of thousands of children and paralyzed or killed many, captured public attention like headlights freezing a deer, and brought drastic changes to the way large-scale medical research is financed and conducted.”🦠
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The first lesson on leading a remote team when the world’s on fire is the most obvious one, but it’s shockingly easy to miss: the operative phrase is not remote team but world’s on fire.
How The Government Can Mobilize In A Pandemic
Author Max Brooks (& comedian Mel Brook’s son, became an expert on disaster preparedness — from pandemics to nuclear war — through researching for his book, ‘World War Z.” Listen to 🎙 interview with Terry Gross.
overcast.fm
Nextstrain is an open-source project to harness the scientific and public health potential of pathogen genome data. We provide a continually-updated view of publicly available data alongside powerful analytic and visualization tools for use by the community. Our goal is to aid epidemiological understanding and improve outbreak response.
“A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.”
— Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen #🦠📖
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“Infectious disease is a kind of natural mortar binding one creature to another, one species to another, within the elaborate biophysical edifices we call ecosystems. It’s one of the basic processes that ecologists study, including also predation, competition, decomposition, and photosynthesis.”
— Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
#📖
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In Singapore, the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong reminded the public about the 2003 SARS outbreak and said he planned to overreact to the coronavirus.
“We have built up our institutions, our plans, our facilities, our stockpiles, our people, our training,” he said on Jan. 31. “Because we knew that one day something like that would happen again.”
Decisions and blunders made months ago have caused testing disparities worldwide. The science, it turns out, was the easy part.
