The Plague Cycle

Charles Kenny 2011, BvtnLib 614.49

Kenny is a decent writer, not a difficult book to read.

• p99 Cornell's Paul Sherman and Jennifer Billing "suggest one reason for the link between the heat of the air and the heat of the food: many spices kill bacteria. Garlic, onion, allspice, and oregano inhibit or destroy every bacteria they've been tested on.

• p193 Andrew Wakefield paid $80,000 by personal injury lawyer Richard Barr in 1996 to find a link between measles vaccine and autism, published in Lancet and later withdrawn. No A/B comparison, no etiology, no mention of payment. 100,000 misled parents did not vaccinate their children, 1200 people infected in Swansea, 5000 hospitalizations and ten deaths in France, three deaths in Ireland. Lancet article eventually retracted.
• p225 WHO budget flatlined in the 1990s, budget today 30 cents per person per year.

  • West African Ebola epidemic discovered in Guinea March 22 2014. In mid-April spokesman (Gregory Hartl ) said "this outbreak isn't different from other outbreaks" ... By the time the emergency was finally announced in early August, 932 people were already dead and there were 1070 cases of Ebola.

• Hans Rosling sidenote from Science magazine: “ I thought the Ebola outbreak could be stopped locally,” Rosling says. “I just wasn’t smart enough.” (He also felt he was too old to work in a treatment unit.)

I recall sending Kenny? an email about a pair of mashed together references, while puzzling out a connection to a UC Davis researcher studying variations in human leukocyte antigens. However, I cannot find the email nor the references. Ah well.