SARS, plague, etc.
People around here (the Toronto area) are talking about diseases, and even about possible epidemics. We've had two waves of SARS, and many people think not enough was done to make sure the first wave was over, and prevent the second. We now have West Nile virus (affecting only one or two people so far) and of course the famous (one) mad cow in Alberta, who has affected the beef industry, and spread fear, throughout Canada.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was reminded of the mayor in Jaws when so many public officials here in Ontario were rushing to say: "It's safe! Tourists please come! It's perfectly safe!" As you may recall, the mayor in Jaws wanted the beach to stay open for business. In one memorable scene, after a shark attack, he says "my own kid was swimming on that beach." He hopes this means: I must have been convinced it was safe, otherwise how could I have been so reckless or crazy as to let them swim there?
See Jaws screenplay s. 174:
(This screenplay is supposedly not the "final draft" but an "unspecified draft," but I have seen the line delivered in the movie, and I found it in this screenplay.)
Strange new diseases, like the monster in Jaws, stir up primordial fears, and make us realize how quickly many of us will give up any sense of sharing a common destiny with our fellow creatures. Not only is tourism down in Toronto, but many people are afraid to go to public events, or take transit. Those other losers may be going down, but that doesn't mean I have to. (By the way, I still take transit to work every day).
(On tourism: Roy MacGregor said in the Globe [link= http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030625/UROYYN//?query=tourism ] yesterday:[/link] that at tourist destinations in Toronto, "there is nobody around but us.")
Even though the numbers of afflicted people have remained very low (see below), there are plenty of signs of the old fears. There is a certain amount of talk that we must adjust to a "new normal" of disease, and of a rapid spread that will at least be a cousin of an epidemic. Certain major events since about the 80s have cascaded together: AIDS, outbreaks of things like the ebola virus, and at least a vague awareness on the part of the First World that a number of terrible epidemics, as bad I guess as any in history, are ravaging the Third World. Somehow one rich person"s fear of a bad cough is as serious as the slow and painful death of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Africans.
Already there is a political side to this discussion which naturally interests me. The left, represented by [link= http://www.globeandmail.com] Rick Salutin in the Globe[/link], (no free link) says it is global corporations that spread new and strange diseases, making all us little people sick, and even killing us, for profit.
Haven't the corporations carried out corporate farming, putting antibiotics into animal feed and thus increasing the incidence of antibiotic-resistant bugs (see below)? Haven't they put Third World people to work in crowded and unhygienic conditions, which will cause disease to spread rapidly there? Don't they insure the minimal infrastructure of a capitalist economy, including roads and other transport, with few if any public health measures, so that a vast population can travel over a vast area, but no precautions are taken? Haven't they lobbied for tax cuts and resulting cuts in services, including public health, in the First World? Only wise and all-powerful bureaucrats, I guess, would be able to save us.
The nasty racist strand of the right says it is those nasty immigrants from mostly non-white countries who bring in bad bugs. The more respectable, libertarian-leaning brand of right-winger might argue that the public sector has failed in the case of SARS. Like the mayor in Jaws, it is too politicized to do the job. The U.S., they claim, which has remained almost SARS-free, proves the superiority of the private sector.
Of course, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a great public-sector [link= http://www.cdc.gov/aboutcdc.htm] achievement[/link] in the U.S. Staff from the CDC have helped out with Toronto's SARS problem.
The theme of epidemics from foreign sources is an old one. So is that finding fault or guilt, and struggling to distinguish "us" from "them, even though if anything is indifferent to the difference between justice and injustice, it is a virus or a bacterium. Flu, including the great pandemic of 1918-19, has usually begun in Asia. Experts predict another [link= http://www.lehigh.edu/~jgm4/virology/history.html ] pandemic [/link] in 5 to 10 years.
Of course, this reminds us that if we are indeed going to see more epidemics, this will not be a "new normal," but a very old normal. It has been argued that the famous plagues of the past were spread by international commerce in both goods and people.
The plague in ancient Athens afflicted several other places before arriving there. (Thucydides II.47, 48; remarkably enough, this great work is available [link= http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Aabo%3Atlg%2C0003%2C001&query=1%3A1%3A1] on the web [/link]).
Athens at the time had the largest navy in Greece, and an "alliance" that had de facto become an empire, in which rebellion had to be harshly repressed by force. Athenians sailed all over the Mediterranean, sometimes on adventurist enterprises such as an attempt to conquer Egypt.
Athens' enemy in the long war (usually called, borrowing the Athenian name, the Peloponnesian war) was Sparta. Sparta remained free from the plague, which led to speculation that the gods favoured Sparta, or blamed Athens for various aggressions. Spartans built an army, not a navy, and they mostly stayed home, where they had a large slave population to deal with.
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