Those of you who follow this little blog will realise that I can read and write. Which means that I must have been to school at some point. Can’t say I liked it much, and my performances were well,-mixed.
But one person I knew there was a lady called Maria Zambon. She was exceptionally good at things like Science and Mathematics, and you could tell she would go on to great things. Well, I never saw her again. But doing some research for a piece for you, dear readers, I came across her quotes for a site called ecowatch in 2014! Say that again, 2014.
This is an extract
Which leads us to a related extinction scenario: a worldwide pandemic. New diseases emerge every year. Some have the potential to devastate the population. In 1918, a strain of influenza spread worldwide and killed between 20 and 50 million people—more than were killed in all of World War I. In the past several years, diseases like SARS have come close to igniting into worldwide pandemics, and it is not at all inconceivable that, in our airplane-riding, interconnected world, some other virus could arrive on the scene with the virulence and transmissibility to decimate, if not destroy, the human population. “It is not in the interests of a virus to kill all of its hosts, so a virus is unlikely to wipe out the human race,” says Maria Zambon, a virologist with the Health Protection Agency Influenza Laboratory. “But it could cause a serious setback for a number of years. We can never be completely prepared for what nature will do: nature is the ultimate bioterrorist.”
prescience indeed!
I will be returning to this and related themes in latter blogs. With some cocktails thrown in.
https://www.ecowatch.com/10-biggest-threats-to-human-existence-1881939902.html
#pandemic #virologist #MariaZambon #Ecowatch
Learning, Science and Society 