CORONAVIRUS: NOTHING NEW

“The more a virus is transmissible, the more virulent it becomes and vice versa”.                      [Ewald P. The evolution of infection deseases. Oxford U. Press 1994]

If you want to know the truth about the new viral epidemic you have to do nothing but read again the posts that have been published for years on the blog “Il Virus Intelligente” (there is also an English translation “The Intelligent Virus“).

So you can realize there is nothing new in the new epidemic:

• origin of the virus from the animal reserve;
• species jump – from the animal reserve to man;
• transmissibility from man to man;
• rapid spreading of the virus thanks to the moving of hundreds of thousands of people, particularly owing to flights from one side to the other all over the world;
• ecological function of viral epidemics.

Coronavirus statistics

The focusing of media on the dramatic aspect of the matter, that is interpreted uncritically (1) as if they would like to cause panic, had already happened in other recent viral epidemics (Ebola,Sars,..) and obviously they aren’t mentioned in our blogs because all this doesn’t concern the medical/ecological aspect of the problem.

Yet, this time there is something new and it is looking for a scapegoat that is identified,very easily, in the figure of “the Chinese”, clearly different from western people. Certainly the hygienic conditions of Chinese markets and eating habits of the local population favour the species jump from the animal reserve, so as the large number of inhabitants can’t do but favour the spreading of the epidemic. But, anyhow, there are thousands of viruses in the animal reserve and they are waiting for the favourable occasion to carry out the species jump in order to comply with their ecological function, that is to reduce human population.

the Chinese “wet markets”

Let’s think, for example, of HIV, responsible for AIDS, an epidemic quite different but just for this still “active”. This virus made a double species jump through the subtypes HIV1 and HIV2. The manipulation of a large number of monkeys for scientific purposes and not, has favoured the apparentally inesplicable phenomenon of the double species jump in only twenty years.

body temperature measurement

The probability that a virus of animal origin could cause new human contagious diseases had already been foreseen by Burnet (2) in 1950. The eminent virologist had asserted that, once passed to man,” the virus will be able to survive indefinitely if human circumstances of time and place provide,since the beginning, to a wide spreading of it”. In the same way he said ” owing to the ample animal reserve of viruses which can cause diseases in men it’s obvious to think that many others will probable emerge by making the species jump”. Practically Burnet had predicted the appearance of HIVs ( and AIDS) (3).

In more recent times Stephen S. Morse with his ” Emerging Virus” of 1993 had explained all the problems of the double species jump of HIVs and anticipated the various epidemics ( Ebola, Sars,….) and obviously the one of Coronavirus.

Actually the ecological function of viruses, aiming at the reduction of animal populations, but above all the human one, had been foreseen by Leonatdo da Vinci in his “Disputa Pro e Contra la Legge di Natura”. (4)

This intuition by Leonardo is all the more surprising if we think that the first hypothesis about the existence of bacteria causing contagious diseases will be formulated by Girolamo Fracastoro (5) in his “De contagione et contagiosis morbis” in 1546 and more than 300 years will be required to established itself.

All this and much more can be found in the first chapters of ” The Intelligent Virus” and online in the homonymous blog.

But let’s return to the “scapegoat”. The high Court of Justice in Heilongjiang, a province in the north west of China, has stated death penalty (5) for those who diffuse the virus intentionally.

And now we immediately think of the story of the “Column Infamous” by Alessandro Manzoni.

Column Infamous

The story tells about the trial brought in Milan, during the terrible plague of 1630, against two supposed plague spreaders who were charged with the pestilential contagion, caused by mysterious substances, owing to an unfounded accusation of a Caterina Rosa, a common woman of the people.

The trial that took place in the summer of 1630, decreed both the death penalty of Guglielmo Piazza ( a health commissionary) and Gian Giacomo Mora (a barber), two innocent men who were broken on the wheel and the destruction of the latter’s house-shop. As a warning the “Column Infamous” that is called like that after the event, was built on the ruins of Mora’s house.

Only in 1778 the Column Infamous that, now, isn’t an evidence of shame against the offenders any longer, but against the judges who had done a tremendous wrong, was pulled down. A memorial tablet with an account, in seventeenth century Latin, of the penalties inflicted, can be seen in the Sforza castle in Milan.

Manzoni’s work was criticized and defended, while we can’t but be stimulated to think that any problem has to be studied from more points of view and without useless prejudices.

Monatti

(1) Seasonal flu has a death rate of hundreds of thousands people but besides a necessary suggestion to high-risk categories ( children, old people, heart patients, subjects with previous lung infections,…) to vacinate, it doesn’t cause any alarmism.

seasonal flu deaths

(2) Mac Farlane Burnet F. Virus as organism. Pagg.69-79 Harvard University press 1950.

(3) MacFarlane Burnet F. Op. Cit. Pagg. 124-127

(4) Leonardo da Vinci. Disputa Pro e Contra la Legge di Natura. Codice Arundel. (263). 1478-1518 already at the British Museum of London. Republished in Leonardo da Vinci Literal Writings pag 169 BUR. Milano 1961

(5) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo Fracastoro

(6) More than7 years of detention for those who reject quarantine and 15 years for those who spread ” rumours” on the epidemic.

Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci