The Mysterious World of Viruses – A Science Friday tidbit.
By Dave Eshleman
Viruses are strange entities. Too small to be seen by standard microscopes, scientists weren’t able to get a look at them until the invention of the electron microscope in 1943. They’re simple things, little more than “a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news” in the words of Nobel laureate Peter Medawar.
The Mysterious World of Viruses – A Science Friday tidbit.
By Dave Eshleman
Viruses are strange entities. Too small to be seen by standard microscopes, scientists weren’t able to get a look at them until the invention of the electron microscope in 1943. They’re simple things, little more than “a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news” in the words of Nobel laureate Peter Medawar.
And they’re not even alive! By themselves, they’re inert and harmless, but when they get into your system, they burst into life, hijacking the genetic material of your cells to produce more of themselves, and reproducing in a prodigious manner, then bursting out in search of more cells.
There are over five thousand types of known viruses, and between them they afflict us with many hundreds of diseases, ranging from the common cold to some of the biggest killers of human beings: Smallpox, rabies, yellow fever, Ebola, polio, and AIDS. In the twentieth century alone, smallpox is estimated to have killed 300 million people.
They often befuddle scientists by bursting upon the scene from some unknown origin, then vanishing as quickly as they came. In 1916, for example, people in Europe and America started coming down with a strange sleeping sickness. Victims would fall asleep and never wake up. Some could be roused, but when left alone, would quickly fall back into a torpor. A very few survived and regained consciousness, but thereafter existed in a state of profound apathy. The disease killed more than five million people, then quietly vanished.
You would be forgiven if you’ve never heard of encephalitis lethargica because shortly thereafter, the worst pandemic in history, The Great Swine Flu, swept across the world. No one knows the global death toll, but some estimates have put it as high as one hundred million. It arose as a normal non-lethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow mysteriously morphed into something much deadlier. Almost 80 per cent of the U.S. casualties in World War I came not from enemy fire, but from flu. In some units the mortality rate was as high as 80 per cent.
Our proven best protection from these nasty entities are vaccines. As you know, Rotary International has led the fight to eliminate the polio virus by vaccinating millions of children around the world. This herculean effort, along with other vaccination programs, has saved untold millions of lives, and brought us to within a whisker of banishing this crippling virus forever.
Tragically, pockets of resistance remain. The ruling Taliban have refused vaccination teams access to Afghanistan, while like-minded tribal leaders have done the same in rural parts of Pakistan, providing the wicked virus a safe haven and an open invitation to cripple and kill more children. Even more alarming, the United States now has an anti-vaccination crusader in charge of public health. The inevitable result, I fear, will be a resurgence in long-dormant viruses and a huge increase in preventable deaths.
I sincerely hope I’m wrong.