Todos estamos cagados de miedo por la posible pandiemia de gripe aviar (hay otras, centenares, pero esta es la pandemia sexy que le gusta a los diarios). El tema es que hoy la masiva mobilidad de personas en el planeta es una sistema ideal para la difusion de enfermedades. La peste bubónica que arraso a europa medieval viajaba a aproximadamente 14 kilómetros por día. Hoy sonámos: se da la vuelta del mundo en mas o menos un día.
Tres físios alemanes descubrieron una nueva fuente de datos para analizar cómo se podría difiundir la próxima pandemia.
Un sitio llamado Where's George? rastrea las idas u vueltas de billetes de un dolar. Ingresando en número de serie del billete te muestra en que lugares ha estado el mugriento papelito que misteriosamente podemos intercambiar por bienes y servicios de todo tipo.
Los resultados de su primer estudio aparentemente desmintieron el modelo standar de epidemología que argumenta que los virus se desparaman en una forma parecida a una ola. Los alemanes vieron que los billetes, al contrario, se movian en pequeños saltos, de vez en cuando interumpido por un gran salto.
Relacionado: Un nuevo libro The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai de John Tayman estudia como fueron trataos un grupo de leprosos en Hawaii a mediados del siglo 19. Especúla que podría ser un caso extrapolable: que cuando venga la próxima pandemia se harán campos de concentración para aislar a los infectados.
Imagen: Zombies de la pelicula 28 Days Later, que retrata a una inglaterra devastada por una atroz pandémia.
[Pandemia]
27.1.06
Here Comes Pandemia!
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January 22, 2006
'The Colony,' by John Tayman
Exiles of Molokai
Review by MARY ROACH
One passage in "The Colony," perhaps more than any other, epitomizes John Tayman's singular powers as a chronicler of human misery. It appears in a chapter that addresses the very special torments of a subset of Molokai's leprosy sufferers known as the blinds. Tayman has earlier explained that the bacteria that cause leprosy (or Hansen's disease, as it is now also known) seek out the cooler peninsulas of the human land mass: noses, earlobes, toes and fingers and, most devastatingly, eyes. The bacteria - which take cover from the patient's immune system by hiding out in (and destroying) nerves - soon erase the cornea's exquisite sensitivity. With no blink reflex, the eye's delicate surface dries out and is torn and scarred by an onslaught of everyday irritants: dirt, lashes, the patients' own fists as they rub their eyes. Blindness follows.
Here comes Tayman to blow us away: "Doctors tried training patients to blink on schedule, using a timer or some other device. The technique worked in some cases, but only if the patient was physically able. Leprosy bacilli also attack the nerve controlling eyelid muscles, creating a condition known as lagophthalmos, in which the person is unable to close the eyelids. In such cases surgeons rigged a thread of muscle from the jaw to the lid, which caused the person to blink as he chewed - doctors then handed them a pack of gum." Tayman's understated and unadorned presentation of these small, unthinkable human circumstances achieves a quiet greatness. It whispers; you cry.
"The Colony" chronicles the forced exile of leprosy patients, from 1866 to 1969, to the remote Kalawao colony on Hawaii's Molokai island. Tayman shows us that the true horror of leprosy lay not in the biological details of the disease, ghastly as those were, but in the day-to-day consequences of those details. What is it like, for instance, to try to dress yourself when you cannot see and the skin on your hands has gone numb? ("Makia learned to dress by touching his clothes to his lips, where a small spot of sensitivity remained. He could identify his shirts by the slickness of the fabric and tell his shorts from his pants by the weight.")
Tayman's narrative pulls the reader beyond the superficial, medical horrors of leprosy to the more devastating human horrors that lie beneath. In doing so, he has brought to light the profound dignity of his subjects. Less mature, less comprehensively researched accounts of leprosy, with their slavering, rococo descriptions of the disease's horrid physical toll, generate, at their basest, revulsion, and at best, pity. Tayman's noble account makes you want to stand and applaud. It makes you want to walk up to these people and shake their hands.
And you could do so with almost no fear of contracting the disease. The kicker here, the monumental inequity, is that people with leprosy were exiled for no good medical reason. Leprosy is not an especially contagious disease. Only 5 percent of the population are genetically susceptible to it. And even they would probably emerge untainted: only a third of untreated leprosy patients have the disease in its active, infectious state.
Yet so great was the hysteria surrounding leprosy that hundreds, probably even thousands, of people who only appeared to have the disease were packed off to colonies. At one point, patients in Kalawao were allowed to request a rediagnosis. Ten out of the first 11 to do so did not have leprosy. A diagnosis of leprosy, accurate or inaccurate, amounted to a criminal conviction. By law, people deemed lepers could be hunted down, stripped of their rights and torn from their families. And most of them were - until well after effective treatment was established, in the 1940's. The story of Kalawao is the story of an injustice as deep and complete as any in human history.
The ignorance and occasional arrogance of public health policy makers was only partly to blame. To understand the indelible and abiding stigma of leprosy, Tayman takes us to the Bible. "And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron, saying, When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, a scab, or a bright spot . . . he is a leprous man, he is unclean: the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean." No matter that neither scabs nor bright spots are symptoms of leprosy. The disease took on an unshakable moral pall. "Although Leviticus contains no explicit moral diagnosis," Tayman writes, "scholars have determined that priests likely viewed any skin disorder as a sign that someone had offended God." This was the prevailing assumption in the early days of Kalawao. Even the colonists themselves viewed their afflictions as punishment for their sins.
With the exception of the book's opening chapter - a flash-forward account of a murder committed by a leprosy victim on the lam in the 1890's - the narrative of "The Colony" rides a straightforward chronology. For obvious reasons, Tayman bases his account of the early years of Kalawao on news reports and archival material - some 8,000 pages of it. (Tayman became something of an exile himself, moving to Honolulu to be close to the Kalawao archives.) The archives of an institution, alas, typically contain far more information about the people running it than the people confined in it. And it is the victims, at least in this case, who were the more compelling. For the final third of the book, Tayman is able to work from his own interviews with three of the colony's last living exiles. The strength and humanity of these people brings the book to life in a way that the archival matter of earlier chapters cannot. This imparts a noticeable, if unavoidable, unevenness to the book.
Tayman, a former deputy editor of Outside magazine, is neither the first nor the best-known writer to take on Kalawao. Jack London sailed to Molokai at the urging of the founder of the Hawaiian Bureau of Information, Lorrin Thurston, who was eager to dispel overwrought rumors of Kalawao's horrors. Leprosy had infected Hawaii itself, thwarting an early annexation movement and crippling the islands' nascent tourism. London held himself in check for the magazine piece that ran upon his return, then let loose some months later in a short story: "They were monsters - in face and form grotesque caricatures of everything human," he wrote. "One woman wept scalding tears from twin pits of horror, where her eyes had been." Thurston was enraged, calling London "a sneak of the first water, a thoroughly untrustworthy man and an ungrateful and untruthful bounder."
In 1889, Robert Louis Stevenson spent a week in Kalawao. "I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard stories that cannot be repeated," he wrote. "Yet I never admired my poor race so much nor (strange as it may seem) loved life more than in the settlement." Stevenson's words are moving, but they are, at bottom, about Stevenson and not the colonists. Tayman never makes an appearance in his text or even directly states an opinion. He lets the facts condemn and the details amaze and appall; and his work is by far the stronger.
Mary Roach is the author of "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" and "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers."
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22roach.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Lepers' stories are unbelievably true
Review by SUSAN HALL-BALDUF
January 22, 2006
'The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai'
****
out of four stars
By John Tayman
Scribner, 420 pages, $27.50
The first definition of "leper" is "someone who has leprosy." The second definition is "someone who is socially or morally unacceptable."
For thousands of years anyone who had the skin and nerve disorder we now call Hansen's disease was beyond unacceptable, and the word "leper" is deeply insulting to many Hansen's patients.
But to call the residents of Hawaii's notorious Molokai leper colony "patients" is cruelly farcical. The first hundreds of the 8,000 people exiled to that rocky peninsula between 1866 and 1969 received no medical care at all. They also didn't have enough food, and there wasn't enough shelter.
As John Tayman tells in his riveting "The Colony," they were sent away for the betterment of mankind: They were supposed to die there.
And yet they were also expected to be self-sufficient. No public money was to be wasted on them. From all walks of life -- accountants and schoolteachers as well as peasants, who were often goat herders and not farmers, anyway -- they were supposed to cultivate taro root and make it into food.
Imagine if you and I caught bird flu and the government had us shipped to an empty parcel of land in Minnesota and told us to grow winter wheat.
Tayman says people with leprosy are more feared than contagious. Only about 5% of the population can be infected, he says. Unfortunately, 19th-Century Hawaii was overwhelmed by epidemics, and leprosy at least looked containable: The victims were easily identified (or so the authorities thought -- they were often wrong), not like those with the venereal diseases that killed thousands. Also, the contagion moved slowly -- unlike smallpox, which hit Hawaii in February 1853 and killed nearly half the residents of Oahu by July.
These frightening numbers make the plan to round up all the lepers almost understandable. But not really.
A Hawaiian physician wrote in 1882: "Once declared a Leper the person is civilly dead, incapable of suing or being sued, divorced from wife, separated from family. ... The greatest scoundrel who walks has the privilege of trial by jury, with a lawyer to defend and a judge to see that a fair and impartial trial is had. But woe betide ... the sick one unfortunate enough to be declared a Leper. No hope: no appeal."
Antibiotics brought the first cure for leprosy in 1942; the law exiling people to Molokai was repealed in 1969. Tayman reports that in the summer of 2004 the average age in the community was 76, and many of the nearly 30 former patients had been there 50 or 60 years. Some of his most vivid accounts come from interviews with those people.
But the stories he pries out of dusty documents are also richly detailed. The editorial creative director of Men's Health magazine, Tayman can stand toe to toe with Erik Larson ("Devil in the White City") for his ability to weave meticulously researched material into a fascinating narrative.
He wants the reader to be a little afraid of George W. Bush's threat to have the U.S. military enforce quarantines when the flu pandemic arrives. This seems a stretch -- I don't really think you and I will end up in Minnesota trying to work out the difference between a combine and a plow -- but he certainly can keep a reader up at night.
SUSAN HALL-BALDUF is a Free Press copy editor.
Copyright © 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060122/FEATURES05/601220307/1030&template=printart
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