The spread of the deadly Ebola disease in Zaire and elsewhere is likely to be contained quite easily by the rapid quarantining in local hospitals. However, certain other factors of great concern need to be addressed. Firstly, resistance to most of our mainline antibiotics (five out of six, I believe) is now becoming widespread - so the incentive for bacterial diseases to mutate is considerable. Already many hospitals have built up their own local bacterial populations resistant to most antibiotics. Try as researchers may, new antibiotics are not appearing on the scene. There can be little doubt that, before too long, many empty, sterilised hospitals will have to be kept in reserve to which patients and staff can be swiftly transferred when a working hospital becomes too dangerous. The more that we are efficient in using our limited stock of antibiotics, the more will bacterial diseases mutate.
Secondly, virus diseases, although local in origin, can be transferred from one end of the earth to the other well within their incubation periods. But this long-distance transfer is not so serious as the mass-transfer effect that can take place within large cities and between cities and environs by large numbers of commuters travelling every day. There will probably come periods when traffic in and around major cities will have to completely cease for two or three weeks at a time in order to quarantine a virus disease within a city. The economic effects of this with its ramifications into the further economy could be as great as a major earthquake or other disaster.
This is reminiscent of what towns and villages had to do in the Middle Ages in the case of the plague. (Trade between villages usually took place on the banks of rivers, so that the money could be washed in the river.) As recently as 150 years ago, smallpox sufferers in the New York region were forcibly put on boats and sent to drift down the Hudson River to the open sea. One of the factors in the evolution of well-guarded territories of hunter-gatherer tribes was for the containment of disease. Except for occasional inter-marriages and trade (for example, salt and obsidian) there was almost no social interchange between tribes (thus tribes living only a few miles apart would develop their own quite different languages - as is still the case of the thousands of tribes in Indonesia - or was until recently).
Thus, in addition to the effects of the Internet in encouraging distance-working, there will also be a powerful (and increasingly necessary) public health effect in the development of small communities which can be quarantined rapidly without too much economic disruption. It is very interesting and significant indeed that the Internet started as a necessary decentralised system that would enable individual defence establishment to remain operative by being able to communicatd with one another in the event of a centralised headquarters being taken out by a nuclear bomb.
Decentralisation of cities for reasons of public hygiene will be inevitable.
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX (tel 01225 442377; e-mail: <k.hudson@bbcnc.org.uk>).
Previous / Next / Table of Contents