One reason people turn to conspiracy theories is that, in times of fear, they need explanations for things they don’t understand. More understanding of the ecology of infectious diseases is needed in order to comprehend why we have emergent diseases. To that end I offer some reading suggestions.
First, a couple of short articles to set the table.
Want to Stop the Next Pandemic? Start Protecting Wildlife Habitats
Don't Blame China. The Next Pandemic Could Come From Anywhere
If you don’t read anything else, read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. (The book itself, not the various fictional and supposedly non-fictional dramatizations that have been made from it. I can’t stress this enough. Hollywood BS is not educational.)
It’s a page turner for sure, but it is not the sensational parts that I am recommending, but rather the understanding of how emergent diseases enter human populations and the role that habitat destruction plays in the process.
THE EMERGENCE OF AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rainforest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of tropical biosphere.
The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth. Many of them come from tattered edges of tropical rain forest, or they come from tropical savanna that is being settled rapidly by people.
The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world's plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoir of viruses, since all living things carry viruses. When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in wave through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere. [My bold]
If you do not have an electronic reader to download the book from your local library, the full text is available online for free.
archive.org/…
The other book I recommend is Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill. It does not deal with modern emergent disease so much, but rather with the whole history of human plagues from an ecological standpoint, how host-parasite relationships co-evolved as humans transitioned from life as hunter gatherers first to that of farmers and then to life in cities.
Eventually, agricultural populations became dense enough to sustain bacterial and viral infections indefinitely, even without the benefit of intermediate non human hosts.
Plagues and Peoples is not an easy read, but it is fascinating.
A quote from one of my personal heroes:
In times of stress and danger such as come about as the result of an epidemic, many tragic and cruel phases of human nature are brought out, as well as many brave and unselfish ones.
William Crawford Gorgas
And one that has been my email sig since 2008:
Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.
Albert Camus