The Viral Storm

July 11, 2011
Why does the threat of pandemics seem to be growing, as with recent bird and swine flu outbreaks? With the doggedness of a medical detective, Stanford biologist Wolfe attempts in this engrossing and fast-paced chronicle of medical exploration and discovery to uncover how pandemics start, why we are now plagued by them, and what we can do to prevent them. Viruses, Wolfe points out, are ubiquitous and not all harmful; marine viruses, for example, help maintain environmental equilibrium by killing certain bacteria. Wolfe traces how human evolution has made us more vulnerable to dangerous viruses, arguing forcefully that the domestication of animals provided close contact with a small set of animals, allowing their microbes to cross over into humans and spread widely through increasingly settled and sedentary populations. He reiterates that preventing the spread of various microbes is as simple as practicing good hygiene, but he observes that such practices are impossible for much of the developing world. So he and his institute, the Global Viral Foundation, are now developing strategies such as monitoring the butchering of wild game (through which microbes could jump into humans) to better forecast and to prevent large viral outbreaks. 45 b&w illus.