A Pandemic Page-Turner

Nov. 29, 2021 — Talking about dread ailments may not be your concept of enjoyable vacation dialog, however Lydia Kang, MD, co-author of Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World’s Worst Diseases, thinks it ought to be.

After all, we’re in the midst of a pandemic, and this isn’t the primary time we’ve confronted a pathogen. We sat down with Kang, a main care physician in Omaha, NE, to seek out out what impressed her to jot down this e book, which incorporates the compelling human tales behind such outbreaks as smallpox, bubonic plague, polio, HIV, and COVID-19, and why it’s a must-read.

WebMD: It should have been surreal to jot down a e book about scary ailments throughout a pandemic.

Kang: When my co-author, Nate Pedersen, and I made a decision to jot down the e book, it was pre-pandemic. Then one thing began to percolate in Wuhan, and we thought, “Maybe this will end up in the book.” We had no concept it was going to turn out to be a world pandemic.

WebMD: What’s fascinating is that COVID-19 isn’t the principle focus of your e book.

Kang: Exactly. Our e book isn’t solely targeted on COVID-19. It’s concerning the interactions between people and infectious ailments and the enjoyable/attention-grabbing historical past of the science behind it. We cowl mad cow illness, measles, and all of the quackery that surrounds the unfold of a illness, from mercury and bloodletting to hydroxychloroquine.

WebMD: What would you like individuals to know concerning the COVID-19 pandemic and bats?

Kang: Don’t hate bats. I feel that’s once more a type of actually basic beliefs that each one these zoonotic spillover occasions are coming from bats and that these animal species are horrible. That blame recreation isn’t useful. These animals have a proper to be right here. It’s not essentially their fault they’ve coronaviruses teeming within them. Bats have lived with these actually uncommon, unusual viruses for a very long time, however it doesn’t kill them. We even have rather a lot to be taught from them.

WebMD: What worries you about what’s coming down the pike, infectious-disease-wise?
Kang: Once COVID-19 settles down and maybe turns into an endemic virus identical to the flu, there may very well be one other one. The overwhelming majority of recent infections (greater than 60%) are zoonotic, which signifies that they arrive from animal sources. Those spillovers are attempting to occur consistently. We’re all the time being barraged with the opportunity of different viruses and, whereas most can’t cross from individual to individual or replicate in people, that one in 1,000,000 confirmed up, and that’s most likely what COVID-19 was.

WebMD: How can we be ready for the subsequent one?

Kang: This is a large wake-up name for various international locations to be extra ready. COVID-19 was unhealthy, however it may have been worse. So what we have to do is to push out vaccines rapidly — we’ve nice expertise — and we must always talk higher with different international locations sooner than we did this time.

WebMD: Should this e book be required studying?

Kang: That can be superb. In considered one of our critiques, a author wrote that this e book can be well-placed in a library. I’d like to see it in lecture rooms and school curriculums that cowl the human relationship with infectious illness. Sometimes, science will be dry and onerous to grasp. We tried to make our e book one thing readable, considerably entertaining and essential.