Name: A Planet of Viruses
Rating: 4.4 (76 reviews)
Author: Carl Zimmer

What’s in it for me? Take a peek into the astonishing world of viruses.

Every year an influenza epidemic sweeps across the world, leaving hundreds of millions sniffling and coughing in its wake. Although it kills a number of people every year, there are far worse and far deadlier viruses around. The last Ebola outbreak killed thousands, and it could have been a whole lot worse. In our globalized world, viruses can spread farther and faster than ever before.

But are viruses all bad? If they can do so much harm to us, maybe they can also keep other dangers in check?

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why the Romans rubbed their faces with mice;
how viruses save lives; and
why Ebola is so hard to eradicate.

The common cold has been a nuisance for thousands of years.

The common cold is a relatively harmless, but rather annoying sickness we’re all forced to deal with now and again. Our parents had it, our great-grandparents had it, and even our most ancient ancestors had to deal with fevers, coughs and runny noses.

The common cold is typically caused by the rhinovirus, a virus that was a nuisance to the Ancient Egyptians too. In the 3,500-year-old medical text Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian scholar documents the symptoms of “resh,” including a persistent cough and excess mucus in the nose. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

While the symptoms of the common cold in ancient times match what we see today, methods of treatment have changed considerably. Egyptians were given a rather sensible prescription of herbs, incense and honey to apply around the nose, whereas the Romans were convinced that rubbing a mouse around their nose was the best way to defeat the sniffles!

History also provides us with a range of wildly different explanations for the common cold. Ancient Greeks chalked it up to an imbalance of the four bodily fluids, i.e., blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Seems rather unbelievable now, but the common cold’s cause eluded physicians even up to 1900, when physiologist Leonard Hill posited that colds were caused by moving from hot air to cold air, the way you might do when taking a morning walk.

Fortunately, scientific research from the early to mid-twentieth century helped uncover the true cause of the common cold. We now know that the rhinovirus is responsible. So do we know how to defeat it?

Despite centuries of experimenting with different remedies for the common cold, we still lack a fool-proof cure. The answer may lie in attacking the genetic code of the virus. But it’s worth asking whether we should bother finding a cure in the first place. After all, the rhinovirus and other harmless viruses teach our immune systems to react appropriately to benign infections, making it better able to deal with viruses that are serious threats to our health.

What are these deadly viruses? That’s what we’ll find out in the next blink.

Influenza can be deadly and will continue to surprise us.

Influenza, or the flu, is another viral infection we’re all familiar with and that has plagued humans for centuries. Today, we know a lot more about influenza than we did in the past. And yet, we still struggle to find a reliable cure for this sickness, which can be deadly.

The influenza virus works by destroying the protective membrane lining a person’s airways, making them susceptible to pathogens present in the air they breathe. This in turn can lead to fatal lung infections. Up to 50 million people died as a result of influenza during the 1918 global flu epidemic. Even this year the flu is likely to kill between 250,000 to 500,000 people.

Some viruses are crucial to our survival.

Would you believe that some viruses are actually good for you? If not, it’s time to take a closer look at the biology of a particular kind of virus: bacteriophages.

Bacteriophages, or “phages” for short, are viruses that have the power to cure diseases. How? They eat bacteria. Bacteriophages were discovered and named by Canadian-born doctor Felix d’Herelle while studying the feces of French soldiers suffering from dysentery in WWI.

A knowledge of the history of viruses prepares us for our future with them.

Scientific knowledge of viruses is constantly developing. Can this tell us anything about the role of viruses in our future?

Take HIV for instance. Since it was discovered in the 1980s, 60 million people have contracted the virus, and nearly 30 million died as a result. HIV works by fusing the host’s immune cells together, inserting its DNA and multiplying at an incredible rate. In its efforts to fight off the virus, the immune system is weakened, making the host susceptible to dangerous diseases such as pneumonia.

Virus epidemics are dangerously unpredictable.

Advancement in modern medicine allows us to be more effective at fighting viruses than ever before. But how safe are we really?

The problem is that we simply can’t predict when a virus such as Ebola will take root. The first outbreak of the disease took place in 1976 in Guinea, where nightmarish symptoms such as violent vomiting, explosive, bloody diarrhea and even bleeding from the eyes caused the deaths of 318 sufferers.

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