Coronavirus a familiar threat

Live long enough and it seems that everything can show up for at least the second time.

The havoc wrought on international trade by zoonoses, animal-derived viruses, rings a bell with me anyway. Way back in the early 1960s my boss had membership of an international group of police chiefs, the journals of which came out in French. He called for a volunteer to translate, and with a view to keeping a grip on that language, and, let’s face it, a bit of brown nosing because I’d just passed all of my sergeants’ exams, I put up my hand. I had to research the term ‘epizooties’, and discovered that police forces worldwide were concerned about the international trade in wild animals, and the diseases getting into humans from wild, as opposed to domesticated, creatures.

Most of these came, as they still come, from ‘‘bush meat’’, eaten in those days by people who had simply no alternative. Nowadays it seems a lot are consumed by those driven by crank nutcase ideas of effecting cures for conditions they cannot afford medical treatment for, or maybe for which there are in fact no cures.

Unsurprisingly, coronavirus and its successors will mostly kill us olds, an exact reversal of humans’ usual process of killing the flower of our generations by means of wars. We haven’t seen a fraction of the death toll this outbreak will cause; that will be revealed when, if ever, the figures come out from the Third World where totally inadequate medical resources are the rule.