If “emerging viruses” were last year’s pop scare — a lucrative terror embraced by moviemakers, authors, even some science writers — a counterreaction may be setting in. Truth is, there’s little to fear from the cunning beasties, says veteran science journalist Ed Regis (“Who Got Einstein’s Office?,” “Great Mambo Chicken & The Transhuman Condition,” and the new one, “Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the Centers for Disease Control”). Regis is known as a wry and perceptive chronicler of real science as well as nonsense. He spent months with CDC scientists documenting how they stopped an Ebola epidemic. When he began, he was as frightened as anyone; now, Regis has no trouble sleeping.
Q: Has the threat of viral epidemic arising from Africa been overstated and is it scaring people needlessly?
A: We are really not as threatened by these agents as some writers would have us believe. Let’s take the African hemorrhagic fevers as an example.
Q: These are the afflictions marked by high fevers and massive oozing of fluids from body openings, illnesses caused by the Ebola and Marburg viruses.
A: Yes. They were the two that Richard Preston wrote about in “The Hot Zone,” which is a fabulous book. However, it must be recognized that both viruses are extremely rare. And as soon as word of an outbreak reaches public health officials, they take steps to quell it.
Q: So these viruses aren’t difficult to stop?
A: If it were true that Marburg and Ebola could get out into the general population by, say, airliner travel, then why hasn’t it happened? Marburg was discovered in 1967. Ebola first broke out in 1976. There’s been enough time for the world to have been decimated many times over.
Q: How many people have died from these diseases?
A: In history, Marburg has killed 10 people–more people have walked on the moon. In the history of Ebola, about 750 people have died over the last two decades. Now that’s a tragedy, but the numbers aren’t huge.
Q: Why then have the viruses gotten so much attention?
A: People love to be scared. They love to hear the world is going to end. Something inside us makes us want to read about imminent doom. It’s also big business.
Q: So the horrific symptoms and agonizing death are sufficient to scare us, even though the instances of actual infection are rare?
A: That’s a distinction people lose sight of: The fatality rate for Marburg is about 27 percent; for Ebola about 77 percent. So if you contract Ebola, chances are very good you are going to die a horrible, painful–albeit short–death. That said, very few people have died from these things. In the United States, every year 100 people die after being struck by lightning and 1,000 from choking on food. Compare that to the 20-year toll of Ebola.
Q: So these things aren’t even that common in Africa, despite lack of public health resources?
A: Malaria kills hundreds of thousands a year. Yet no one pays attention. It’s like it doesn’t matter.
Q: How have the viral killers been contained in Africa?
A: By a combination of things. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that viruses are merely submicroscopic particles of matter. We tend to think of them as ghostly, almost magical influences that somehow can walk through walls. It is just a particle of genetic material, DNA wrapped inside a protective protein coat. If I have it in my body, in order to infect you, that virus has to travel between me and you. Some can migrate through the air: measles, influenza and common cold viruses. With Ebola and Marburg, almost all transmissions have been explained by direct person-to-person contact with blood, vomit and other fluids.
Q: And public health authorities learn of the outbreaks and move in to isolate the infected?
A: They come in, bring supplies and terminate the outbreak. All you do is quarantine people suffering from the virus and protect yourself with gowns, gloves, masks and goggles. That’s what personnel from the Centers for Disease Control did in Zaire. They were inside Pavilion 3, the Ebola pavilion. When you stop new transmissions and protect yourself, the virus can’t do you any harm.
Q: Did you go into the pavilion with the CDC to report for your book?
A: Not when there was live virus present. When the news broke, I was as scared as any other American. I was as brainwashed. I’d read “The Hot Zone.” I didn’t want to go down there and die. It was only after having done the research that I got a sense of perspective. It was after the Ebola was gone that I went to Zaire.
Q: Some writers suggest that somehow humanity is becoming more vulnerable to a plague because our expanding population is limiting the diversity of other life forms. People speak of “the revenge of the rain forest.” Do you reject this notion?
A: I would call it irresponsible unscientific nonsense. Likewise the argument that the microbes are winning. And they’re winning today. In 1996.
This is very doubtful. World population has been increasing through human history with very few exceptions, such as the era of the Black Plague. That’s when the microbes were winning–when one-third of the population of Europe and a large portion of the population of Asia died because of infection. But the world’s population between 1980 and 1990 increased by 800 million. How can the microbes be winning while human life expectancy in nearly every country is increasing? Even infant mortality rates have been decreasing. These are gross measures of public health, but they tell us human health is getting better. The evidence doesn’t suggest we’re more vulnerable. It suggests we’re less.
Q: Do you believe the CDC is up to the task of heading off any diseases that nature sends our way?
A: You have to distinguish between the situation in the world at large and that in the U.S. Very few people die here of infectious disease, only about 5 percent of deaths. Most people die of heart attacks, cancer and strokes. The CDC cannot help us with that. We have to help ourselves through better diets, no smoking, less alcohol and so on. So far as infectious diseases go, the CDC could protect us in a more single-minded way than perhaps it is doing now.
Q: In your book, you argue that the CDC has taken on missions that go far beyond its original goal of protecting Americans from infectious disease. Why is that?
A: The CDC evolves and grows according to the laws of a bureaucracy. If there is anything out of control, it is bureaucracy. The CDC started in 1942 for the sole purpose of wiping out malaria in the American South. And indeed, in this country there is no more malaria except for people who come from Africa or Southeast Asia. CDC was very successful with narrow, clearly defined tasks. Now, it has gotten so big and has taken on so many tasks that are far beyond its original purpose that even some people at the CDC will agree they’ve gotten too big and are trying to do too much.
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An edited transcript
