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Business News/ Opinion / The virus on your screen
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The virus on your screen

As scientific unease grows over the evolution of MERS and Ebola, so too might popular anxiety

Photo: Fox Premium
Photo: Fox

The other night I was watching a new (to me) television serial called Fringe, which presented a now-familiar script—and current scientific worry. A man starts bleeding from his nose, coughs fine blood droplets and dies. In short time, the signature nose bleed begins in people around the victim. As the story’s protagonist—a scientist who was locked up for 17 years in a mental institution and is now in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s payroll (don’t ask)—identifies the invisible villain as a pre-Jurassic virus dug up along with an ancient oil sample, it emerges that he and sundry grim, overcoat-clad officials are concerned with only one thing: Is the virus airborne?

Viruses are the flavour of the entertainment season. Last week, I saw the Indian premiere of a television serial called Strain, in which a virus threatens to transform people into, um, vampires. An airborne virus (with the moniker ALZ-113, a cure for Alzheimer’s gone wrong) kills most of humanity in the current movie hit, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

You could, of course, argue that terrorists are equally popular film and television villains, and you would be right. That’s because a terrorist, much like a virus, reflects a human anxiety—rooted in reality but often disproportionate to the real danger.

This week, unease grew over an unfolding viral reality that came out of nowhere two years ago in the Arabian Peninsula and earlier this year reached the US: the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) virus, a deadlier but—thus far—less contagious version of the 2003 SARS virus that panicked the world. A paper published on Tuesday in mBio, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology, suggested this deadly new virus—327 of 850 people officially infected have died—may have gone airborne, a terrifying evolutionary stage for any virus with such a kill ratio. Saudi Arabian scientists plucked fragments of the virus’ RNA, or genetic material, from the air in a barn housing camels, identified as animal reservoirs for MERS. “This work clearly highlights the importance of continuous surveillance and infection measures to control the global public threat of MERS-CoV (coronavirus)," the investigators wrote.

There is no known cure for MERS, although in another paper released this week, a team of scientists at the US National Institutes for Health and University of Maryland School of Medicine reported that 13 existing pharmaceutical compounds, including some used to treat certain kinds of cancer and psychiatric conditions, were found to inhibit the virus’s ability to invade and infect cells. The paper acknowledged that new medications for new viruses were unlikely.

“Given development times and manufacturing requirements for new products, repurposing of existing drugs is likely (to be) the only solution for outbreaks due to emerging viruses," noted the paper in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Many contagions are what one microbiologist calls orphan diseases. Plainly put, these are diseases that Western pharma giants do not believe to be worth their while, given the time (about a decade) and expense (about $5 billion). It has been 40 years since the Ebola virus jumped to humans from apes in the forests of West Africa to become among the deadliest ever known, killing roughly nine of 10 people infected.

So, while science has advanced greatly in understanding Ebola, researchers Kartik Chandran and John Dye wrote in Huffington Post that pharma companies are “understandably unwilling" to fight diseases that infect a few thousand people every few years in poor countries. Last week, the toll from the deadliest outbreak of Ebola in history crossed 600 across three countries. Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, told Reuters: “The situation is serious but not out of control yet."

That out-of-control feeling is specifically evident as soon as a virus goes airborne. Presently, Ebola spreads through vomit, sweat, mucus and blood, its victims dying as they bleed from eye, ear and nose.

An airborne Ebola or MERS would be a dramatic reminder of misplaced popular anxieties.

The terrorist’s depredations are visible, violent and headline-grabbing. The virus—an infinitely more menacing, invisible piece of life—does its work quietly, killing humans in massively greater numbers than the deadliest terrorist, making it to prime-time only when humans are killed quickly enough with no cure in sight.

In 2013, when terrorism-related deaths hit a six-year high, no more than 17,800 people died. In 2012, when HIV-AIDS-related deaths fell 30% compared with a peak seven years before, 1.6 million people died. Obviously, the terrorist is no match for the HIV-AIDS virus, let alone all the viruses in existence.

Even wars don’t match up. World War I claimed about 37 million lives. But in 1918, the year the Great War ended, the Spanish flu pandemic swept the world killing between 50 million and 100 million people, disappearing as quickly as it appeared that year.

I have a feeling we will see more viruses than terrorists on our screens.

Samar Halarnkar is a Bangalore-based journalist. This is a fortnightly column that explores the cutting edge of science and technology. Comments are welcome at frontiermail@livemint.com. To read Samar Halarnkar’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/frontiermail

Follow Mint Opinion on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Mint_Opinion

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Published: 24 Jul 2014, 07:13 PM IST
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