World history unfolds through deadly germs
Pana Janviroj, The Nation, Asia News Network, Bangkok
Who would have thought that a tiny bacteria, perhaps from an animal raised in a heavily-populated southern Chinese city, could cause so much panic?
It certainly doesn't puzzle some historians, especially Jared Diamond, the author of the best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel. He hammered home evidence that the major killers of humanity throughout our recent history were infectious diseases that evolved from animals. These were smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, the plague, measles and cholera.
The book is an ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics. Its dimensions complement and at times dwarf often popular military or ideological approaches.
Diamond looked back at the world history over the past 13,000 years and found that the rise of agriculture, as opposed to hunting and gathering, was "the source" for the evolution of infectious diseases.
And spread they did -- as far back as 2,000 years ago, when globalization was underway with the expansion of the Roman empire. The trading routes developed by the Romans were seen as being instrumental in the spread of smallpox, which killed millions of Roman citizens between AD165 and AD180.
The jet era has helped to hasten the speed at which a disease can travel. In 1991 an Aerolineas Argentines plane, stopping in Lima, Peru, delivered dozens of cholera-infected people on the same day to residents of Los Angeles 5,000 kilometers away.
These crowd diseases, as with SARS, evolved with the build up of large, dense human populations. Diamond traces the process with the rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, which then accelerated with the rise of cities.
Scientists have found that many of the agents of new diseases are confined to various species of domestic animals and pets. But regarding epidemics, the conditions are lethal, especially with cows and pigs.
The measles virus is most closely related to the virus causing rinderpest. It affects cattle and many wild cud-chewing mammals, but not humans. Measles in turn does not afflict cattle. But the close similarity of the measles virus to the rinderpest virus suggest that the latter transferred from cattle to humans and then evolved into the measles virus by changing its properties to adapt to humans.
Such a transfer is not surprising given that many peasant farmers live and sleep close to cows and their faeces, urine, breath, sores and blood.
The Chinese farmers who today live with their chickens, cows, ducks and so on in densely-populated Guangdong province, where SARS is believed to have originated, are part and parcel of the evolution of China -- or part of how the nation is developing its economy, science and technology, political organizations, intelligence and culture.
It all has to do with food production and food security of the world's most populous nation which is undergoing rapid economic changes. Diamond's thesis is that along with the rise of dense, sedentary, food-producing populations came the rise of chiefs, kings and bureaucrats.
History implies that such bureaucracies were essential not only to governing large and populous domains, but also to maintaining armies, sending out fleets of exploration, and organizing wars of conquest.
If Diamond is right, what will happen to China as it moves to realign its system of food production to end the cozy relationship between man and animals which first gave rise to crowd diseases? China's bio-geography could radically change in every sense of the word.
The SARS crisis could prove to be another watershed in the history of fast-evolving China and Asia.