The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease written by Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, is an astute explication of our species’ battles with microbes since the dawn of human time. For 4,000 years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilization growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion — quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic cycles — resulting in an urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy world.
However, our development has lately become precarious. Climate and population fluctuations and factors such as global trade have left us more vulnerable than ever to newly emerging plagues. Greater global cooperation toward sustainable health is urgently required — such as the international efforts to manufacture and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine — with millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake.
The book quote the research by infectious Disease Mortality Trends in the United States, 1980-2014 conducted by Victoria Hansen, etc. In 1900, eight out of every one thousand people died from an infectious disease, and that wasn’t an unusual year. And according to the study by Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, Bernadeta Dadonaite, The global child mortality rate of the 1950s was 22.5%, close to one death every second. five times the level of today.
As we have more understanding of history, The Plague Cycle author draw these conclusion:
The Covid-19 pandemic perhaps is only a forecaster of even worse to come. Perhaps we’ll backslide. If anti-vaccine prophets peddle their deadly disinformation without response, if our last antibiotics are wasted on adding a few ounces of white meat to a chicken breast, if we do nothing to improve global cooperation, surveillance coverage, and rapid response to outbreaks.
Now we know what the world will look like. The world surely recognizes that pestilence may be the more likely source of a millennial global catastrophe – certainly the first horseman rides ahead of terror, climate change, or a collapse in food production. A planet without our most effective tools against infection is one moving back toward Malthusian misery. It is a world where our view of mortality as an increasingly private affair is blown away by mass burial of the young. It is a world that is poorer, more violent, more insular – a bigoted and misogynistic place.
The history of infection teaches a particular lesson to those who want to withdraw from international cooperation: if disease becomes the excuse for closing borders and deploying force, the costs to global progress will be immense. We don’t have to accept a new pathogen as the will of God – nor are flight, fortresses, or imprisonment our only defense against the scourge.