Quotulatiousness

December 17, 2021

Scott Alexander on the risk of ancient plagues returning

Filed under: Environment, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The other day, Scott Alexander responded to a hair-on-fire New York Magazine piece of hysteria-mongering about climate change warming up arctic zones that may still harbour ancient plagues that can return:

I’m a little nervous talking about this, because I am not a microbiologist. But I haven’t seen the proper experts address this properly, so I’ll try, and if I’m wrong you guys can shout me down.

(Also, the real microbiologists are apparently “self-injecting [3.5 million year old bacteria] just out of curiosity” and we should probably stay away from them for now)

I think we probably don’t have to worry very much about ancient diseases from millions of years ago.

Animal diseases can’t trivially become contagious among humans. Sometimes an animal disease jumps from beast to man, like COVID or HIV, but these are rare and epochal events. Usually they happen when the disease is very common in some population of animals that lives very close to humans for a long time. It’s not “one guy digs up a reindeer and then boom”.

If a plague is so ancient that it’s from before humans evolved, it’s probably not that dangerous. In theory, it could be dangerous for whatever animal it originally evolved for — a rabbit plague infecting rabbits, or an elephant plague infecting elephants. And then maybe after many rabbits are infected, some human might eat an infected rabbit and get unlucky, and the plague might mutate to affect humans. But I don’t think this is any more likely than any of the zillion plagues that already infect rabbits jumping to humans, and nobody is worrying about those.

The story about anthrax is a distraction. The fact that someone got anthrax from a corpse frozen in permafrost is irrelevant; there is anthrax now, and you could get it from a perfectly fresh corpse or living animal if you wanted. It’s adapted to animals and it can’t spread from person to person. Just because you got an irrelevant-to-humans modern animal disease when you dug up a modern animal, doesn’t mean you’re going to get a dangerous-to-humans disease from an ancient animals.

But I’m more concerned about recent human plagues coming back.

Not bubonic plague; that one is another distraction. The reason we don’t get more Black Deaths isn’t because yersinia pestis died off or mellowed out. It’s because we have good sanitation and pest control.

And doctors whose knowledge of medicine doesn’t begin and end with “look like a creepy bird”

But the 1918 Spanish flu has, as far as I know, legitimately died out. Lots of people like saying that in a sense it’s still with us. This NEJM paper (with a celebrity author!) points out that it’s the ancestor of all existing flu strains. But most of these flu strains are less infectious than it was. This didn’t make sense to me the first, second, or third time I asked about it: why would a flu evolve into an inferior flu? Sure, it might evolve into a less deadly flu because it’s perfectly happy being more infectious but less deadly. But I think the Spanish flu was also especially infectious; so why would it evolve away from that?

April 5, 2021

The 1919 Red Scare – the craziest year in American history

The Cynical Historian
Published 19 May 2016

Many people have heard of the first Red Scare, but we should look at the year of 1919 more thoroughly. It’s probably the craziest one in American history.

Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007). https://amzn.to/2NHIcaT
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LET’S CONNECT:
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wiki:
The First Red Scare was a period during the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included those such as the Russian Revolution. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of communism and anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of paranoia.

The Scare had its origins in the hyper-nationalism of World War I as well as the Russian Revolution. At the war’s end, following the October Revolution, American authorities saw the threat of Communist revolution in the actions of organized labor, including such disparate cases as the Seattle General Strike and the Boston Police Strike and then in the bombing campaign directed by anarchist groups at political and business leaders. Fueled by labor unrest and the anarchist bombings, and then spurred on by United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s attempt to suppress radical organizations, it was characterized by exaggerated rhetoric, illegal search and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detentions, and the deportation of several hundred suspected radicals and anarchists. In addition, the growing anti-immigration nativism movement among Americans viewed increasing immigration from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe as a threat to American political and social stability.

Bolshevism and the threat of a Communist-inspired revolution in the U.S. became the overriding explanation for challenges to the social order, even such largely unrelated events as incidents of interracial violence. Fear of radicalism was used to explain the suppression of freedom of expression in form of display of certain flags and banners. The First Red Scare effectively ended in mid-1920, after Attorney General Palmer forecast a massive radical uprising on May Day and the day passed without incident.
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Hashtags: #History #1919 #RedScare #SpanishFlu #Bolshevism #BlackSox #strikes #WoodrowWilson #LeagueOfNations #prohibition #suffrage

[Note: this was filmed in 2016 … I think 2020 has now taken the mantle of “craziest year”. Unless 2021 doubles down all the weirdness of 2020.]

March 30, 2021

Leaky labs and the WHO’s whitewash efforts

Filed under: China, Health, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh outlines some of the historic “diseases escaping from the lab” events that certainly allow us to be … dubious about the WHO maintaining the line that the Wuhan Coronavirus was “unlikely” to have escaped from the biological lab in Wuhan:

The original SARS virus, which terrorized Canada in 2003, has escaped from laboratories and infected humans at least six times since its successful suppression in the wild — once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times from one laboratory in Beijing.

And then there’s the great enigma in the history of infectious disease (maybe the second greatest — I for one would still really like to know what the English sweat was). How in blazes did the H1N1 flu virus come back? A strain of H1N1 was responsible for the Spanish flu of 1918-19; it lingered in human populations and continued to evolve until it was seemingly supplanted by a cousin, H2N2, which swept the world during the 1957-58 “Asian flu.”

H1N1 just plain vanished for two decades, then reappeared rather puzzlingly in Russia in 1977, causing a “Russian flu” pandemic and 700,000 deaths. This strain wasn’t especially lethal, but it knocked those too young to have natural immunity to H1N1 flat on their rears. Since then, H1N1 has been endemic in humans — it is incorporated as a matter of course into seasonal flu vaccines — and modern genetic analysis shows that the 1977 strain of H1N1 was, DNA-wise, pretty much a carbon copy of H1N1 strains from before the Asian flu years.

The “Russian flu” therefore almost certainly cannot have reappeared naturally, since it had undergone almost no discernible evolution. It probably crossed into Siberia from (wait for it) mainland China, which was then not yet a WHO member state. Some analysts think this may have happened because of a lab leak. Others think it more likely that it was a botched effort to create an H1N1 vaccine from old samples; H1N1 had crossed over to a small number of humans in the United States in 1976, creating the famous “swine flu” scare.

Still others ask: uh, is the difference between a lab leak and a botched vaccination experiment particularly meaningful? The general public may not know it, but a pandemic originating in a research laboratory isn’t just a hypothetical. It has not only happened, but there’s a decent chance that you, personally, have suffered from the resulting disease.

November 5, 2020

America on the Brink of Revolution? | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.02 – Winter 1919

Filed under: Britain, Business, France, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 4 Nov 2020

There is revolution and fear of revolution throughout the world in the winter of 1919. But cultural and technological revolutions are also bringing hope to many. A new age of Jazz and Cinema is about to reach America and Europe.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Archive Research: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Mikołaj Uchman
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:

From the Noun Project:
– Money by Gilberto
– lightbulb By Maxim Kulikov

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound and ODJB:
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “The Last Journey” – Line Neesgaard
– “Tiger_Rag” – ODJB
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Please Hear Me Out” – Philip Ayers
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “I Won’t Give You Up” – Almost Here
– “The Charleston” – Macy’s Voice
– “Defeated” – Wendel Scherer

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
As in life, this series will always be a curious balance of light and dark. In the winter of 1919, one Parisian might have tickets to see the Original Dixieland Jass Band while their neighbour lies destitute after the war, and a well-to do man in Glasgow might be at the cinema while tanks rolls into his city to quell industrial unrest.

Troubled and fascinating times then and troubled fascinating times now here in 2020. All of us here at TimeGhost hope that all of you are healthy and staying safe. And hey, if you need some entertainment to pass the time, you can find plenty of Between 2 Wars episodes alongside WW2 In Real Time and BIO Specials!

October 29, 2020

War, Cinema, and Cheese! | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.01 – Harvest 1918

TimeGhost History
Published 28 Oct 2020

War, poverty, and disease continue to pummel the word in the wake of the Great War. But still, humanity carries on, not only surviving but creating a host of futuristic opportunities in the arts, the economy, and … cheese.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Archive Research: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
(BlauColorizations) – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/

Sources:

From the Noun Project:
iron cross By Souvik Maity, IN
poverty By Phạm Thanh Lộc, VN
Skull_51748

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Rememberance” – Fabien Tell
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Steps in Time” – Golden Age Radio
– “What Now” – Golden Age Radio
– “Sunday Worship” – Radio Night
– “Astray” – Alec Slayne
– “Break Free” – Fabien Tell

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 day ago
Welcome back to Between Two Wars! Strap in for what is going to be an exciting ride through the massive cultural, social, economic, and technological shifts that take place after the Great War. We can’t guarantee this will always be a positive tale. These changes entail plenty of fear and suffering, and even ‘fun’ things like the Jazz Age have their darker sides.

But that doesn’t alter the fact that the interwar era is a time of promise where people envision modern futures to replace old pasts. There is everything to play for in this brave new world and a vision of progress all around in politics, culture, food, and more.

June 13, 2020

“1648” Pt. 2 – War and Disease – Sabaton History 071 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 12 Jun 2020

War and Plague. Just two horsemen of the apocalypse but never really far away from each other. Where armies march, disease usually follows. From the earliest records of time to modern day, epidemics and contagious diseases are the cause of uncountable deaths. Pandemics like the Spanish Flu or the Bubonic Plague killed millions of people around the world. To survive, mankind had resort to quarantines and plague houses, and put its trust to physicians and the evolution of modern medicine.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “1648” on the album Carolus Rex:
CD: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexStore
Spotify: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexSpotify
Apple Music: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexAppleMusic
iTunes: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexiTunes
Amazon: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexAmz
Google Play: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexGooglePlay

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Ryan Weatherby, Karolina Dołęga

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– Welcome Images
– National Library of Scotland
– IMW: Q 10378,
– National Museum of Health and Medicine
– National Archives
– Icons from The Noun Project by: Muhamad Ulum & Adrien Coquet

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

May 30, 2020

The Spanish Flu Influenza Pandemic 1918 – 1920 I THE GREAT WAR 1920

The Great War
Published 29 May 2020

Sign up for Curiosity Stream and get Nebula bundled in: https://curiositystream.com/thegreatwar

It was far deadlier than even the global war that had preceded it: The Influenza pandemic or Spanish Flu that hit the world between 1918 and 1920 in multiple waves.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
Merchandise: https://shop.spreadshirt.de/thegreatwar/

» SOURCES
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, (New York : Penguin Books, 2018)
Byerly, Carol R. ‘The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919’ Public Health Reports; 125 Supplement 3 (Apr. 2010)
Crosby, Alfred W, America’s forgotten pandemic : the influenza of 1918, (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Hoover, Irwin Hood, Forty-two years in the White House, (New York : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1934)
Killingray, David & Phillips, Howard, (eds.) The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19: New Perspectives, (London : Routledge, 2011)
Johnson, NP & Mueller J, ‘Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918-1920 “Spanish” influenza pandemic’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 76(1) (Spring 2002)
Dock, Lavinia et al., History of American Red Cross Nursing (1922)
Macdonald L. The Roses of No Man’s Land. (London : Penguin Books, 1993)
Robertson, John Dill, ‘Spanish Influenza — The Flu’ The Public Health Journal Vol. 9, No. 10 (Oct 1918)
Rosner, David, ‘”Spanish flu, or whatever it is…”: The paradox of public health in a time of crisis’ Public Health Reports, 125 Supplement 3, (Apr. 2010)
Stanford University, ‘The Influenza Pandemic of 1918’ https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
“Surgeon General’s Advice to Avoid Influenza”: Washington Evening Star, (Sept. 22, 1918)
Wever, Peter C & van Bergen, Leo, ‘Death from 1918 pandemic influenza during the First World War: a perspective from personal and anecdotal evidence’ Influenza Other Respiratory Viruses, 8(5), (Sept 2014)
https://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2008/1…

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»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig

Channel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van Stephold

A Mediakraft Networks Original Channel

Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020

December 5, 2018

The Spanish Flu I THE GREAT WAR Epilogue 2

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 3 Dec 2018

The Spanish flu has quickly spread all over the world since the spring of 1918 and will become the disease that killed more people in a shorter period of time than any other disease in human history.

October 26, 2018

Italy Attacks – The Battle of Vittorio Veneto I THE GREAT WAR Week 223

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 25 Oct 2018

After the Battle of the Piave, the Italian front had been relatively quiet and stable. But just as unrest and instablity spread through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Italian Army and its allies attack along the whole front. From Monte Grappa and across the Piave, the Austro-Hungarians are caught off guard.

August 20, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – Lies – Extra History

Filed under: Health, History, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 18 Aug 2018

Series writer Rob Rath is here to tell us about all the moving pieces and complex storylines he researched to write our Flu Pandemic episodes.

August 13, 2018

History of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Filed under: Health, History, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published on 23 Jan 2018

The History Guy remembers humanity’s deadliest flu outbreak, the influenza pandemic of 1918.

The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.

August 12, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – The Forgotten Plague – Extra History – #6

Filed under: Health, History, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 11 Aug 2018

Why did everyone forget about the flu pandemic so fast? Partly because its effects were intermingled with the death and depression of World War I, and partly because we chose to forget.

August 6, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – Leviathan – Extra History – #5

Filed under: Africa, Health, History, India, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 4 Aug 2018

This is a global pandemic. The flu jumps ship, literally, onto the docks of American Samoa, of South Africa, of Alaska, of India. The 1918 flu infects every human continent.

August 2, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – Fighting the Ghost – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Health, History, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 28 Jul 2018

Philadelphia gets hit the hardest. New York fares somewhat better, but everyone is trying to keep hush-hush about a pandemic that still found its way into a children’s rhyme: influenza.

July 23, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – Order More Coffins – Extra History – #3

Filed under: Health, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 21 Jul 2018

Dr. Welch, Dr. Avery, Dr. Park, and Dr. Williams are on the hunt now to correctly identify this new pathogen and make a vaccine. But public officials are in denial. In Philadelphia, the mayor and his health officials are telling the press that the outbreak is nearly over. They continue doing so, day after day, as the death toll mounts and hospital wards fill.

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