Virus in the works
Suddenly, from nowhere, the world is worried about and even obsessed with a new disease. There are about 100,000 total global cases of people infected with the coronavirus (Covid-19) and 3,000 people have died of it. This fatality rate of 3 per cent is about one third that of SARS, which was also a coronavirus. It was also zoonotic, meaning it could be transmitted from animal to human. The SARS outbreak of 2003 infected 8,098 people of whom 774 died. Meaning it was less infectious, or at least better contained, though more fatal when one actually got it.
The symptoms were high fever, headache and a dry cough (SARS stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome). The disease spread when an infected person coughed and the droplets carried to the mouth, nose and eyes of another person.
Coronaviruses do not kill people of themselves. It is usually the aggravation of a pre-existing condition, or a weak body, that tends to respond more poorly to an infestation of the virus. The disease kills usually people aged over 40 and rarely gets someone young because their bodies are healthier generally.
Viruses don’t reproduce themselves but require a host and then hijack it, forcing it to make copies of the virus. It also evolves through mutation and that is what explains the new varieties. A bacteria on the other hand reproduces by cell division. Bacteria respond to antibiotics but viruses do not, which makes them difficult to treat. We let the cold, which is also caused by a virus, to run itself out. This is not possible with other, more deadly viruses like AIDS.
Much is being made of the fact that people abroad are doing namaste instead of shaking hands as a means of avoiding the coronavirus. But skin to skin is not the only way in which it is transmitted and just washing one’s hands is a good means of keeping safe.
For some reason China seems to be the point of origin of a lot of diseases that affect us globally. The Black Death was the name of a plague that wiped out millions of people around 1350. It was borne by rodents, which were hosts to fleas that were the actual carriers of the disease. Of course, people did not know how the disease was spread and till it was discovered that it was the rodents, the epidemic flared freely in the absence of countermeasures.
One contemporary account from Italy described the effect of the plague on people:
“In men and women alike, it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg…
From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo (a tender swelling, a bubo) soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. As the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves.”
I was in Surat in 1994 when the city was affected by the plague. There was little or no information on what this was and how it was to be countered. It was assumed that one reason was that it was because Surat was a dirty city. It was, there is no denying that, but it wasn’t any more or less dirty than other Indian cities at the time. And also other Indian cities now, for that matter. I remember that the city was deserted in the day and a lot of the migrant workers who make up the city’s population fled, going back to their villages in the north of India. Surat’s plague was pneumonic and not bubonic, meaning it affected the lungs.
That disease had 1,000 recorded cases and 50 deaths. It was followed by a clean-up of Surat under a dynamic municipal commissioner named S R Rao who became a civic hero for transforming the city’s cleanliness culture.
The thing about disease and the human body is that we still don’t really understand a lot of it. Till only about 250 years or so ago, even the most advanced European medicine was based on Aristotelian principles of the four humours: black bile, phlegm, blood and yellow bile. This was mostly nonsense and cures were based on balancing these through blood-letting, vomiting, sweating or diet. Greek medicine came into the Islamic world after the conquest of Egypt and the most revered name in that space is that of Ibn Sina. Today when we have Rooh Afza, made by the company Hamdard, we are having Ibn Sina’s formulation of a thousand years ago.
In that sense, medicine, even modern medicine, is not a science like mathematics or chemistry is a science but more like economics and the weather. There are no fixed conditions and there is a great deal of turbulence in the field. This is getting better as we better understand things like the genetic code but real and full knowledge is still not near, so far as I have understood it.
That is probably why our instinct even in this modern age is still to panic and act irrationally in the face of information or words like virus and plague. Surat emptied out that year but only 50 died in all. Many times more died in the same period also of avoidable causes.
The prime minister has cancelled his visit to Brussels as a result of the confusion and the fear of the spread of the disease and estimates from the OECD say that India will lose more than 1 per cent of its GDP growth to the coronavirus epidemic this year and also be affected the next.
One hopes that this is not the case, and also that like SARS, this disease having come now goes away as soon as possible.