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Coronavirus footnote1 is the old movie that we’ve been watching over and over again since Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone (1994) introduced us to the exterminating demon, born in a mysterious bat cave in Central Africa, known as Ebola. It was the first in a succession of new diseases erupting in the ‘virgin field’ (that’s the proper term) of humanity’s inexperienced immune systems. Ebola was soon followed by avian influenza, which jumped to humans in 1997, and sars, which emerged at the end of 2002; both initially appeared in Guangdong, the world’s manufacturing hub. Hollywood, of course, lustfully embraced these outbreaks and produced a score of movies to titillate and scare us. (Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, released in 2011, stands out for its accurate science and eerie anticipation of the current chaos.) In addition to these films, and the innumerable lurid novels, hundreds of serious books and thousands of scientific articles have responded to each outbreak, many emphasizing the appalling state of global preparedness to detect and respond to such novel diseases.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II122/articles/mike-davis-in-a-plague-year _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
