Deep Currents

Everyone knows AIDS came from some damned African hunter going after monkeys in the bush. The CDC now has an early warning system for tracking signs of diseases as they arrive, but there’s very little known about how disease migrates from animals to humans. Now one scientist is delving into the question, and what he’s found is that there is a constant exchange to the point that 1% of the population in equatorial Africa is walking around carrying an animal virus. The reason we don’t see more diseases like HIV is that it’s quite tough for a virus to make the jump, remain infectious and yet constrain its tendency to kill its carrier. Armed with this knowledge, he’s setting up a kind of pandemic radar to track the viruses as they evolve towards that lethal combination.

Written: April 29th, 2007