I’m not on the pandemic beat, but some of the best science journalists are, and they are busy these days. Today, David Quammen, author of the recently published and critically acclaimed book, Spillover: Animal infections and the next human pandemic, has an op-ed in the New York Times. It begins: Terrible new forms of infectious…Continue Reading…
Be very scared, argues Robin Cook, in this essay in the Nov/Dec issue of Foreign policy. Somebody, he says, needs to write a gripping, mega-selling novel to shake up the complacent public about the high risk of an imminent, serious pandemic. And I don’t mean the much-publicized swine flu. While the world media has obsessed,…Continue Reading…
Are we on the cusp of revolutionizing the scientific method, or merely speeding up the scientific process? Either way, this is a fascinating post by Carl Zimmer on how scientists used a wiki to collaborate in real time on the swine flu virus and then publish their results a little more than a month later…Continue Reading…
From pandemic panic to party mode–all in one week.
Mexico may still be in lockdown mode, but I suspect American fears of swine flu are ebbing. Alas, we may have only a short reprieve before pandemics starting hitting with regularity, warns epidemiologist Larry Brilliant in the WSJ weekend edition: In our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes, we will face a broad array of dangerous…Continue Reading…