Zimmerman Barry E. - Killer germs: microbes and diseases that threaten humanity

MICROBES AND DISEASES THAT THREATEN HUMANITY

REVISED AND UPDATED

Barry E. Zimmerman David J. Zimmerman

Copyright 2003 by Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Marilyn and Sondra, our wives and best friends
who are the wind beneath our wings

To Amy, Tara, and Corie, our lovely daughters
for just being there

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night,
nor for the arrow that flieth by day,
nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness

PSALM 91

MANY THANKS TO Margaret Colvin, Carol Courtney, Ann Halitsky, Bonnie Savitz, Raymond Hernandez of the Lyme Care Center, Dr. Vincent Fischetti, head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology at The Rockefeller University, and Dr. David M. Klaus, Associate Director of BioServe Space Technologies, for their guidance and technical assistance.

The beginning of health is to know the disease.

CERVANTES

THERE IS EVIDENCE of infectious disease in the fossil of a bird dating back ninety million years. A dental abscess has been found in a human ancestor between one and two million years old. (Human ancestry dates back three to five million years.) Tuberculosis was rather common six thousand years ago, during the New Stone Age, in northern Africa and Europe. Devastating plagues date back several thousand years. A smallpox plague in Rome nearly two thousand years ago killed millions of Roman citizens during a fifteen-year reign of terror. Those who survived the pestilence were often left blind or horribly disfigured. The preserved body of a Chinese noblewoman who died twenty-one hundred years ago showed scars of tuberculosis and three different kinds of worms. The conquest of the New World that began with Columbuss historic voyage was more the result of diseasesmallpox along with measles and influenzathan of swords and bullets. Napolon owed his defeat in Europe to General Typhuswhich, thanks to the bite of a louse, decimated his armiesmore than to any military leader. Typhus also killed three million people during World War I. Bubonic plaguethe Black Deathcaused the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire in the seventh century. It killed twenty-four million Europeans in six years in the middle fourteenth centuryone-third of the European population. According to Frederick Cartwright in Disease and History, Mortality was so great that the Pope consecrated the river Rhne at Avignon, so that corpses flung into the river might be considered to have received Christian burial. The swine flu took the lives of at least twenty million people in six months during the winter of 1918-19. In comparison, World War I killed fifteen million people in four years.

Infectious diseases have always been with us and have shaped human history perhaps more than any other single factor. Yet they are caused by a power unseen. To quote science writer Bernard Dixon, in Power Unseen, A small bacterium weighs as little as 0.000000000001 [one-trillionth] gram. A blue whale weighs about 100,000,000 [one hundred million] grams. Yet a bacterium can kill a whale. The agent of botulism food poisoning is too small to be seen with the naked eye, yet a twelve-ounce glass of the toxin it produces would kill every human beingall 6.2 billionliving on the face of the earth. As small as germs are, they rule the world.

Disease-causing organisms are a diverse group that fit into five separate categories. From simplest to most complex, they are viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and worms (see ). Unlike the first four, worms are not very small; they are multicellular and, in the case of tapeworms, can be nearly as long as a tennis court.

Table 1 Human Pathogens and Parasites

Of the five categories, those that have posed the greatest threat to developed nations and continue to do so are the viruses and bacteriathe germ diseases. They have been the cause of the worlds great plagues and pandemics. The protozoan and worm diseases are a particular problem in developing nations, especially those with warmer climatesalthough viral and bacterial diseases abound there as well. All disease abounds where there is poverty, overpopulation, and inadequate sanitation and health care.