A lesson learned from PATHOGENESIS: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN EIGHT PLAGUES, by Jonathan Kennedy

 We ignore the power of viruses and bacteria at our own peril.

    In our modern world, we have largely been shielded from the effects of deadly plagues, especially if you live in a relatively modern and developed nation. Of course, we all just lived through the trauma of COVID, a disease that killed less than 1% of the American population yet still caused years worth of massive disruption to people's lives, not to mention the overall global economy. Nonetheless, the western world today is a much more healthy and calm place than it was even a century ago, and that has caused modern generations to assume that vanquishing plagues is as simple of a process as following certain social media trends and advice without having to go through the discomfort and annoyance of modern vaccinations. As Jonathan Kennedy subtly notes in his study Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, we take that laissez faire stance at our own great peril. As his book makes clear, the world has been dominated by bacteria and viruses long before humanity ever arrived on the scene (in one stunning statistic, he notes that the mass of every person on Earth is likely tiny fraction of the mass of all the pathogens on Earth), and our modern medicines and technologies have only just started to keep them at bay. The planet truly belongs to them, and as we grow lax on our medical and scientific advances, they could easily force us back into a helpless position.

    Some of Kennedy's conclusions are bold and not necessarily strongly supported by evidence, and yet also have a stunningly terrifying logic to them. One of the mysteries of early humanity is how we went from a planet full of humanoid species (most notably Neanderthals) to only one, and it was long assumed that homo sapiens had gained some type of intellectual advantage over everyone else that allowed us to eventually triumph. As Kennedy darkly points out, one thing we've noted repeatedly in modern human history is that every time isolated populations encounter one another, there's an inevitable exchange of pathogens that devastates one of them, and there should be no reason for us to suspect that Neanderthals didn't suffer the same fate when suddenly encountering new groups migrating out of Africa. Following the rest of human history, he notes just what an essential role diseases played in the rise and fall of many great empires over the ages, and how many a civilization collapsed because its government had no real answers on how to alleviate their spread. The biggest of plagues (such as the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, and the Great Dying of the Native Americans) lead to wrenching economic and societal change for the people most directly affected by them, not to mention generational trauma as the plagues' survivors tried to process the aftermath.

    Kennedy eventually gets to the modern era, where he notes that billions of people around the world today would likely be dead had we the same standards of medical care that we had two centuries ago, and that the world's governments ensuring access to clean water, air, and food is a vital power in trying to continue to make progress against diseases, as well as top of the line investment in the scientific community. Alas, the world's poorer nations today often lack the resources for these investments, and Kennedy argues modern nations continue to ignore this at our great peril, as those regions are breeding grounds for future plagues that could ripple cross the globe (that's to say nothing of our government's current insistence that scientific research is most certainly NOT a priority). Kennedy's book is a gripping and often worrying read that is highly accessible to the masses, and its dark reminders of how lucky we all are to have relatively long and healthy lives and how hard we need to be working to maintain that are a relevant lesson for our modern, increasingly unhealthy world.

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