The Strategist

How bad is swine flu?

5850 out of 50,182,850.

There are many ways to die, and swine flu is least among them.

Via Coming Anarchy.

Behaving badly in the plague

How would we respond if the world was hit by a fast-moving and devastating plague? Like the Black Death that wrecked havoc in Europe between 1348 and 1350.

Writer Robin Cook reckons that we'd all behave pretty badly (h/t Armchair Generalist)...

"Many public officials will be forced to quarantine themselves from a diseased population and retreat to undisclosed locations, which will only fuel the public panic."

"Riot police in biohazard suits...will increasingly be called upon to beat back waves of sick, scared, and helpless civilians, desperate for food, water, and medicine."

"Services of all sorts will fall off, including police protection, and marauding gangs and black-marketeers will materialize in a kind of hopeless, Darfurian Wild West."

"This will bring out the worst in humanity. Neighbor will turn against neighbor, fighting over newly scarce resources or simply out of fear and resentment."

"Old prejudices will rise to the surface, as minority groups - be they Jews, black Africans, Shiites, Hispanics, gays, or others - are blamed for bringing the plague into healthy communities."

This is scaremongering. Or lame marketing for a new book. Probably both. Cook latches onto the "panic stations meme", the idea that in an emergency everybody goes to pieces - screaming, fighting, kicking, clawing their way towards the exits.

He downplays the variety of ways that people respond to severe and prolonged crises. Some people panic; some remain calm. Some get aggressive; some remain passive. Some isolate themselves; some reach out to family, neighbours, friends and community. Some struggle against fate; some resign themselves to fortune.

Crucially, Cook ignores the capacity of people to cooperate and organize to survive, even in extreme situations. During the Black Death, people still tried to care for the sick, bury the dead, grow and sell food, keep order and so on.

This is the picture in Albert Camus' novel The Plague (1947).  Oran is sealed off after a virulent plague erupts. Most inhabitants try to get on with life as best they can, even as people are dying around them. Some become depraved. Some try to escape. And some, like Dr Rieux and Tarrou, lead efforts to fight the pestilence and keep order.

General Typhus: Napoleon's greatest foe?

If you're a military history aficionado, you'll enjoy this article on Napoleon's 1812 campaign in Russia (h/t YT). Apparently, the greatest foe of the Grande Armée was not the Russian army, nor the Russian General Kutuzov, nor the Russian winter, but a typhus plague that crippled the army even before it reached Moscow...

"That's the conclusion of an investigation that began in 2001 with a gruesome discovery: A mass grave containing 2,000 corpses in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

At first, excavators guessed the victims were killed by the KGB, or were Jews killed during the German occupation. But by examining belt buckles and uniform buttons with regimental numbers on them, archaeologists unraveled the mystery. The dead, it turned out, were soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army."

I'd suggest that typhus was one of a number of factors that destroyed the Grande Armée as a fighting force. Other factors were lack of supplies, hunger, extreme weather and conditions and enemy action. The interplay of these factors, not a single killer blow, brought about Napoleon's downfall.

Swine flu - keeping things in perspective (2)

 

In case you're thinking, "dude, this swine flu thing's really out of control", recall the Black Death, which peaked in Europe between 1347 and 1351. It's estimated that the plague killed 75 million people worldwide, 25 - 50 million of them in Europe (30 - 60% of the European population).

This map (via Global Dashboard) purports to show the spread of the Black Death. It's interesting but grossly simplified. My guess is that the plague travelled along the major sea, river and land trade routes of the time, carried by merchants, financiers, pilgrims, sailors and soldiers of fortune. Rather than bands, the pattern may have looked like a network of arteries, veins and capillaries, with thick "bands" traversing trade routes and concentrating in the large trading, manufacturing and financial centres in Italy, France and the Low Countries.

Swine flu - keeping things in perspective

How many people in Mexico so far have died of the swine flu?

152  7

How many people have been killed in Mexico's drug war in 2009?

2044

How many people were killed in Mexico's drug war in 2008?

6300

The Doomsday Vault

The entrance to the Svalbard vault (photo: John McConnico/AP).

It is a remarkable idea, like something from the sci-fi I read when I was a kid or a Neil Young song. A global seed vault, buried in the frozen heart of an Arctic island, storing seeds from nearly every variety of food crop.

The Svalbard vault, which opened yesterday, is a doomsday measure, intended as a base for reconstituting food supplies in the event of a global catastrophe, such as runaway climate change or nuclear war, or localized disasters, like wars, which wipe out particular crops. It will hold over 4 million batches of seeds.

I've been thinking about whether the vault is a triumph of human foresight, or a monument to human stupidity. Probably the former, although the fact that such a desperate measure is needed shows the extent of our plight.