Me:: Will H5N1 or mpox go pandemic? We don't know at the moment. Donald G. McNeil Jr. :: My book: The Wisdom of Plagues is out in paperback. It has a new chapter with a few things…
Discovered: Jan 10, 2025 07:52 Me:: Will H5N1 or mpox go pandemic? We don’t know at the moment. Donald G. McNeil Jr. :: My book: The Wisdom of Plagues is out in paperback. It has a new chapter with a few things…
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Read the Whole Thing: Donald G. McNeil Jr.:: My book: The Wisdom of Plagues is out in paperback. It has a new chapter with a few things…
My book The Wisdom of Plagues is out in paperback as of today. Since I finished writing the hardback edition in the fall of 2023 and viruses keep mutating — as do perceptions of historical events — Simon & Schuster let me write a new addendum chapter.
Most of it is about our false memories of Covid and the threats of H5N1 and the new central African strain of mpox/monkeypox. I didn’t make any wild predictions because I had to file in September and I feared H5N1 would shift course in the publishing interim. It has: it’s now clearly two separate clades, one in birds and one in cows. And both can infect humans, and as of this week, one human has died of it. That is definitely bad news. The fact that variants infecting humans turned up late in the illness of the Louisiana patient is worrying, but not terribly surprising. When a virus is under a long but weak couterattack from a human immune system, it mutates to evade that attack. That doesn’t necessarily mean that strain will arise in nature. We still can’t say whether this virus will go pandemic or just pick humans off one by one as it has since 1997.