Time to Get Serious About Public Health

In Sierra Leone, where recent public health campaigns are saving children’s (and parents’) lives.

by Richard Conniff

The PBS/Channel 13 show “The Open Mind” has just aired its interview with me about my book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. You can take check out the interview here or if 28 minutes is too big a commitment, take a look at the transcript below

HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind, and I’m delighted to welcome our guest today, Richard Conniff. He’s author of Ending Epidemics, A History of Escape from Contagion. Richard, thank you so much for joining me today.

CONNIFF: Thanks. Good to be here.

HEFFNER: Richard, there’s some dispute about whether three years since COVID-19 struck we’re still in what you could call a pandemic. Where do you come out on that?

CONNIFF: Yeah, I think we’re still in a pandemic in the sense that it’s going to come back again seasonally. It’s going to be global, it’s evolving everywhere, and those who aren’t protected, who haven’t gotten vaccinated will be at risk.

HEFFNER: When you titled your book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion, and specifically you identify epidemic, as opposed to pandemic, that was intentional?

CONNIFF: Yeah, that’s intentional. Epidemics are a lot more common. They occur regionally or in individual nations, and pandemics, where it’s the entire world are relatively rare events.

People, especially in this country take for granted our current state of health
and have no conception of the frequency of epidemic disease in our past.

Richard Conniff

HEFFNER: Take us through, in your mind, whether or not the public sufficiently understands that what we encountered in this pandemic was something that for decades and centuries, many strata of society had suffered in what you call epidemics, as opposed to pandemics. Is that fully understood or was that one of the motivations in writing this book?

CONNIFF: Yeah, I don’t think it’s understood at all. It is the reason I wrote the book that is I think people, especially in this country take for granted our current state of health and have no conception of the frequency of epidemic disease in our past and not even in our distant past. So I think I wrote it partly because I’m old. I was born in the middle of the 20th Century, and my father and my uncle both had polio. When I was five, I was in kindergarten. The polio vaccine became available for the first time. And at that point you know, what had been polio season became summer again. And two years before I was born, there was still smallpox in this country. And whooping cough was quite common. It killed 4,000 people a year in the United States. Children. I shouldn’t just say people. It was children under the age of five for the most part. Diphtheria. I live in New England, and there was a massive epidemic of diphtheria in the middle of the 18th century. Okay, I’m going back ways now, but it’s interesting because entire families, 13 children in one family just gone over a period of days. So yeah, there’s a long history of highly infectious diseases. One other example I had measles. People think measles is a trivial disease now. Doctors don’t even see measles anymore, but measles was a brutal experience about 550,000 kids had it the year I had it. 550 died. And so yeah, these are things that people don’t even think about anymore and don’t think about why we are free of these diseases.

THE FORGOTTEN REFORMER WHO MADE CITIES LIVABLE

Edwin Chadwick, revolutionary thinker

By Richard Conniff

This article is excerpted and adapted from “Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion” (The MIT Press)

It’s almost impossible now, thank God, to imagine the squalor of London and other supposedly civilized cities in the first half of the 19th century. As the rural poor moved to jobs in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, they overwhelmed the available housing and the adjacent, untended, and often uncovered, cesspools. Entire families commonly huddled together in single rooms, even in windowless basements. Overflowing sewage at times made entire cities feel as if adrift on a sea of human waste.

The result was a second revolution, for urban sanitary reform, and it succeeded largely through the outsize influence of one peculiar man. Edwin Chadwick, now mostly forgotten, was a barrister, journalist, and social reformer. From the early 1830s onward, Chadwick campaigned for the British government to intervene in matters of public health and welfare. He promoted essential urban services, including public water supply and sewerage, street cleaning, and garbage removal. Chadwick’s work transformed the character and well-being of cities not just in Britain but, by example, worldwide. Along the way, he helped to establish the basis for the modern liberal state. “Few men have done so much for their fellow-countrymen as Edwin Chadwick,” biographer R.A. Lewis wrote, “and received in return so little thanks.”

This uncelebrated status is no doubt due both to the lowliness of his chief subject — the disposal of human waste — and to Chadwick’s difficult personality. A sanitarian who was a friend described him in the heroic mode: “firm-set massive build,” “resolute expression,” “nose aquiline,” and “the head altogether large, and to the phrenologist finely developed.”

But photographs from the period show a tall, round-faced figure, in mustache and muttonchops, hair smeared in hanks across his balding scalp, peering out from heavy-lidded eyes with something like disdain. Chadwick made a reputation for prodigious energy, and for his command of the facts of any issue he studied. But he was also humorless and uncompromising toward those who disagreed with him. He made little effort to hide his contempt for aristocratic domination or for foot-dragging by corrupt or indifferent politicians.

He was also a bore, “a really outstanding specimen of bore in an age when the species flourished,” according to the otherwise admiring biography by Lewis. “Mr. Chadwick is not an orator,” a friend acknowledged. “When he first gets up to speak without book he looks an orator, but a few moments dispel the illusion.”

Watch Out, Stephen Curry, Moths Have Hand-Eye Coordination, too

A hawkmoth ready to uncurl that proboscis into a nectary (Photo: Anna Stöckl)

by Richard Conniff

I have mixed feelings about sphingid moths, sometimes called sphinx moths because the position their caterpillars commonly assume is said to resemble the Great Sphinx of Giza (but I don’t see it). I prefer to call them hummingbird moths, or just plain hawkmoths. On the one hand, I am deeply prejudiced against some of them for a selfish reason: One of the most dismaying experiences for any vegetable gardener is to step out one morning in late July, just as the luscious and long-awaited tomatoes are coming due–and discover the stems and branches of the tomato plants suddenly stripped bare of leaves. The culprit is the caterpillar of the five-spotted hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata), and they are wonderfully camouflaged to keep their enemies (me, among others) from finding them.

It’s some consolation to find caterpillars after parasitic wasps have already gotten to them. You can see the caterpillar’s body ornamented with the pearly pupae of the next wasp generation. (See the photo at left.) Those I leave where they are, for the budding young wasps to emerge and destroy other tomato hornworms, the ones I haven’t managed to find. The hornworms I find in good health, them I murder.

OK, I’ve gotten that off my chest. The truth of course is that I should not generalize. There are many other species of hawkmoth (1450 of them) that are entirely innocent of molesting my tomato plants. So let’s move on.

I admire hawkmoths mainly for the speed and purposefulness of their flight, the way they whip from plant to plant almost like hummingbirds, with that same motor-like whirring of their wings. Their wingbeat, up to 80 times a second, is actually faster than a hummingbird’s And then there’s the needle-thin proboscis they use for sucking up nectar from flowers. It’s as long as, and sometimes much longer than, the rest of the hawkmoth’s body. 

Now Is Our Time to End Polio Forever

What it looks like when the vaccines don’t get there. (Photo: Unknown)

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

In January 2014 an American public health worker was visiting northern Nigeria to observe a polio prevention campaign by local health workers. It was a big, festive event with a marching band to bring out parents and children for their immunizations. But the American visitor and the local program manager soon found themselves being drawn away from the action, down deserted streets to an area still under construction. They were being led by a young girl.

“And what was happening was that she was

First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Authors

(Illustration: Wellcome Library, London.)

I didn’t plan this piece to coincide with the Patreon campaign I started last week. But it suggests what’s happened for writers like me on the book publishing side of our lives. The magazine and newspaper sides of our work have also suffered at the hands of Internet giants like Google and Facebook.  For me, 2017 was the year these changes really hit home.  In the past, magazines sent me wherever I needed to go to get the story, from Easter Island to Bhutan.  But suddenly three major magazines hiring me to write feature stories asked me, in so many words, to phone it in. One wanted me to write a story “with lots of tick-tock” about tropical deforestation. But the editor would only give me expense money to travel to Washington, D.C. (On reading the manuscript, he complained that he wasn’t “smelling the rainforest.”) Another magazine where I have been a contributor for 34 years asked me to write a travel feature but wouldn’t send me to the destination because a different magazine had sent me there on an unrelated feature the year before. (The editor made it that month’s cover story.) Finally, a magazine (contributor for almost 30 years) didn’t actually tell me I couldn’t travel.  But they asked me for an expense estimate for a proposed day trip to New Jersey from my home in Connecticut. (I went. Yay!)

I don’t mean to complain. I have been extremely lucky to have a career and support my family as a writer. I want to continue doing this work, though, and I want younger writers to have the same opportunities. That is becoming harder and harder for us all. 

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

One day not long ago in a college class I was teaching, some of my students couldn’t find the page I was talking about in the reading. And it dawned on me: There was only one required text in the class, an anthology of writing about the natural world called “American Earth.” And they were reading pirated copies — versions downloaded free from some dubious “provider” on the internet.

It was a college well known for its progressive politics. So maybe my students thought they were striking a blow against the dark hegemony of greedy textbook publishers. Or maybe, tuition and textbook costs having soared into the stratosphere, they just wanted to save 27 bucks, the discounted online price. As gently as possible, I informed them that they were in fact stealing from the author (or, in this case, editor) who happened to be the climate activist Bill McKibben, one of their environmental heroes. Also, Library of America, which published the book, is legally a nonprofit. (Many other publishing companies now achieve that status merely de facto.)

I’m afraid it was a teaching moment fail. My students looked baffled, but unpersuaded, caught up in the convenient rationalization that authors subsist on inspiration and the purest

Bison Begin to Return to Their Old Home on the Great Plains

by Richard Conniff/Smithsonian Magazine

Sometime this winter, if all goes as planned, a caravan of livestock trucks will carry 60 American bison out of Yellowstone National Park on a 500-mile journey into the past. Unlike their ranched cousins, which are mainly the result of nineteenth-century attempts to cross bison with cattle, the Yellowstone animals are wild and genetically pure, descendants of the original herds that once astonished visitors to the Great Plains and made the bison the symbol of American abundance. Until, that is, unsustainable hunting made it a symbol of mindless ecological destruction.

When the appalling mass slaughter of 30 million or so bison finally ended early in the 20th century, just 23 wild bison remained in Yellowstone, holed up in Pelican Valley. Together with a roughly equal number of animals saved by ranchers, they became the basis for the recovery of the species, Bison bison, carefully nurtured back to strength within Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone has done its job so well, in fact, that the herd now routinely exceeds the limit of about 4000 bison thought to be sustainable within park boundaries. Park rangers have thus had the disheartening annual job of rounding up “excess” bison for slaughter or watching some step across the park’s northern border into a hunt that critics deride as a firing squad. Relocating the animals would be the humane alternative, except for one scary problem: Ranchers and others have long maintained that bison spread brucellosis, a bacterial infection that is devastating to both cattle and bison. But an authoritative 2017 study using whole genome sequencing determined that

It’s Time for a Carbon Tax on Beef

(Illustration: Igor Bastidas)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Let me admit up front that I would rather be eating a cheeseburger right now. Or maybe trying out a promising new recipe for Korean braised short ribs. But our collective love affair with beef, dating back more than 10,000 years, has gone wrong, in so many ways. And in my head, if not in my appetites, I know it’s time to break it off.

So it caught my eye recently when a team of French scientists published a paper on the practicality of putting a carbon tax on beef as a tool for meeting European Union climate change targets. The idea will no doubt sound absurd to Americans reared on Big Macs and cowboy mythology. While most of us recognize, according to a 2017 Gallup poll, that we are already experiencing the effects of climate change, we just can’t imagine that, for instance, floods, mudslides, wildfires, biblical droughts and back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes are going to be a serious problem in our lifetimes. And we certainly don’t make the connection to the food on our plates, or to beef in particular.

The cattle industry would like to keep it that way. Oil, gas and coal had to play along, for instance, when the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency instituted mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. But the program to track livestock emissions was mysteriously

This Makes Me Want to Eat Pancakes. (But It’s Only Thursday.)

Fish scales in a piranha’s belly (and enlarged at left)

by Richard Conniff

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about piranhas and what they eat. In fact, I wrote a book called Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals. And, yes, I have also spent a fair amount of time swimming with piranhas.

So naturally this caught my eye:

The piranha that eats scales its whole life, named Catoprion mento, tends to live alone. When it does hunt, it swims up behind its prey, opens its large, Jay Leno-like jaw 120 degrees and

Got Drinking Water? Watch Climate Change Turn It Toxic.

The algae bloom that ate Lake St. Clair. (Photo: NASA/NOAA)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

It is a painful lesson of our time that the things we depend on to make our lives more comfortable can also kill us. Our addiction to fossils fuels is the obvious example, as we come to terms with the slow motion catastrophe of climate change. But we are addicted to nitrogen, too, in the fertilizers that feed us, and it now appears that the combination of climate change and nitrogen pollution is multiplying the possibilities for wrecking the world around us.

A new study in Science projects that climate change will increase the amount of nitrogen ending up in U.S. rivers and other waterways by 19 percent on average over the remainder of the century — and much more in

As Ethiopia Reclaims the Nile, Egypt Dwindles

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa’s largest, is now nearing completion. (Photo: Zacharias Abubeker/AFP/Getty Images)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

Though politicians and the press tend to downplay the idea, environmental degradation is often an underlying cause of international crises.  For instance, deforestation, erosion, and reduced agricultural output set the stage for the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.  And prolonged drought pushed rural populations into the cities at the start of the current Syrian civil war. Egypt could become the latest example, its 95 million people the likely victims of a slow motion catastrophe brought on by grand-scale environmental mismanagement.

It’s happening now in the Nile River delta, a low-lying region fanning out from Cairo roughly a hundred miles to the sea. About 45 or 50 million people live in the delta, which represents just 2.5 percent of Egypt’s land area. The rest live in the Nile River valley itself, a ribbon of green winding through hundreds of miles of desert sand, representing another 1 percent of the nation’s total land area. Though the delta and the river together were long the source of Egypt’s wealth and greatness, they now face relentless assault from both land and sea.

The latest threat is a massive dam scheduled to be completed this year on the headwaters of the Blue Nile, which supplies 59 percent of Egypt’s water. Ethiopia’s national government has largely self-financed the $5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), with the promise that it will generate 6,000 megawatts of power. That’s a big deal for Ethiopians, three-quarters of whom now lack access to electricity. The sale of excess electricity to other countries in the region could also