New Bird Flu Virus & Kalla's Pandemic

In the disease category, we've covered smallpox and HIV/AIDS. Now there appears to be a new strain of bird flu -- with no human-to-human transmission yet, thankfully. Here's yesterday's BBC story "China: Four more infected with H7N9 bird flu:"

A further four cases of a bird flu virus not previously seen in humans have been reported by authorities in China. Three women aged 32, 45 and 48, and an 83-year-old man were diagnosed between 19 and 21 March and are critically ill. There have now been seven confirmed cases of the H7N9 virus, the World Health Organization said. Two people have died. But the WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

For a novel about a worldwide plague of bird flu, try Pandemic by Daniel Kalla:

Right now, in a remote corner of rural China, a farmer and his family are sharing their water supply with their livestock: chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep. They share the same waste-disposal system, too. 

Bird viruses meet their human counterparts in the bloodstreams of the swine, where they mix and mutate before spreading back into the human population. And a new flu is born.... 

Dr. Noah Haldane, of the World Health Organization, knows that humanity is overdue for a new killer flu, like the great influenza pandemic of 1919 that killed more than twenty million people in less than four months. So when a mysterious new strain of flu is reported in the Gansu Province of mainland China, WHO immediately sends a team to investigate. Haldane and his colleagues soon discover that the new disease, dubbed Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome, is far more deadly than SARS, killing one in four victims, regardless of their age or health. But even as WHO struggles to contain the outbreak, ARCS is already spreading...

Smallpox & Carrell's The Speckled Monster

From today's front page New York Times article "Wary of Attack With Smallpox, U.S. Buys Up a Costly Drug:"

The United States government is buying enough of a new smallpox medicine to treat two million people in the event of a bioterrorism attack, and took delivery of the first shipment of it last week. But the purchase has set off a debate about the lucrative contract, with some experts saying the government is buying too much of the drug at too high a price... Smallpox was eradicated by 1980, and the only known remaining virus is in government laboratories in the United States and Russia. But there have long been rumors of renegade stocks that could be sprayed in airports or sports stadiums. Experts say the virus could also be re-engineered into existence in a sophisticated genetics lab.

I don't know about you, but I don't have much idea of what smallpox is like. It appears we are in luck, however, because Jennifer Lee Carrell's semi-novel The Speckled Monster puts us right in the middle of an outbreak:

The Speckled Monster tells the dramatic story of two parents who dared to fight back against smallpox. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccinations that remain our only hope should the disease ever be unleashed again. Jennifer Lee Carrell transports readers back to the early eighteenth century to tell the tales of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, two iconoclastic figures who helped save London and Boston from the deadliest disease mankind has known.