In recent years, we’ve watched
droughts parch the West, heat waves claim lives, and tempests
encroach on the nation’s capital. With the advent of plagues
like West Nile and SARS, soothsayers have enough fodder to last
until the apocalypse. But in Six Modern Plagues and How We are
Causing Them, author Mark Jerome Walters takes mysticism out of the
mix and points to human meddling with nature as the harbinger of
disease.
Walters, a former veterinarian who is now a
professor of journalism at the University of South Florida, coins
the term “ecodemics” for such notorious pandemics as mad cow, West
Nile and Lyme disease, citing human-caused changes in the
environment as the springboards for these diseases. He traces the
journey of West Nile from Africa to backyards across the nation,
and argues that climate patterns resulting from global warming
enabled the migration. He blames industrialized agriculture for mad
cow disease, and draws a connection between the rise of Lyme
disease and rapid development of the Eastern Seaboard.
Some of Walters’ culprits, like crowded cities and a
jet-setting population, are difficult to reform. But others demand
action, such as factory farms that pump cows full of antibiotics.
Above all, Six Modern Plagues shows that environmental
issues are really human health issues — and that our assaults
on nature are nothing short of slow suicide.
Six
Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them
by
Mark Jerome Walters.
195 pages, hardcover $22.
Island Press, 2003.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them.
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