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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2814 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

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There's plenty of diseases without animal reservoirs. We drove it extinct rather than another because of its deadliness.

I actually don't think that's true. Almost all of the infectious diseases we've driven (near) extinct were much milder than smallpox, but we still eliminated them because they had 0 significant animal reservoirs and so it was easy to do.

In high-trust societies with usual first-world levels of state capacity, any disease with a safe and effective vaccine will be eliminated. The return of measles in the US and UK is visible evidence of falling social trust in exactly the same way that locked cabinets in stores are.

The thing that is unusual about smallpox (and, hopefully, polio) is that we committed the required resources to vaccinate everyone even in hard-to-reach parts of the third world.

You're looking at it the wrong way. The question is not "do eliminated diseases have animal reservoirs", it's "are diseases with animal reservoirs eliminated". And there are plenty that are not. It took decades or even centuries depending on when you start counting to eliminate smallpox.

The rough blueprint to eradicate birdflu would be to find every live or dead, bird and mammal on earth(and at sea) and vaccinate or cremate them. What I'm trying to communicate is that any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed. Smallpox was so easy to eradicate with a vaccine and quarantines that the U.S. and USSR accidentally realized they were right next to the finish line when they set out on an initiative to globally eradicate it.

any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed

Yes, obviously. This has nothing to do with my point, which is that the only virus considered serious enough and feasible enough to fully eradicate had a fatality rate under 5%.

The political desire to do this was complicated by the cold war and the realization by both the US and USSR that helping to create public health infrastructure in the very weak and nascent states where the disease persisted was strategically important to expand their spheres of influence.

Are we just making tangentially related, dubiously true assertions now?

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