Our Plagues are Just Starting

 

                                         

                   Our Plagues are Just Starting

Anyone watching the series "Wolf Hall," a terrific story with a benign handling of Wolsey and Cromwell, was probably jolted by the sudden deaths of Cromwell's wife and two daughters who awoke well one morning and died the next day, a cataclysmic illness of sudden and devastating consequences that, even now, has never been explained. It was a common story at the time. "The Sweating Sickness."

The "sweating sickness" first appeared around the time Thomas Cromwell, later chief minister to Henry VIII, was born, at the end of the dynastic Wars of the Roses, and there has been some debate concerning the possibility that it arrived with the invading army of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1485.

By the time it disappeared in 1551 it had caused five devastating outbreaks. To observers on the other side of the Channel, whose countries had apparently remained miraculously untouched (though a later outbreak did spread to Calais), this disease was Sudor Anglicus, or the “English Sweat”.

Suggestions that have been made over the years include influenza, scarlet fever, anthrax, typhus or some SARS-like pulmonary enterovirus. All, however, have had some clinical or epidemiological aspect that  didn’t quite fit the description of the sweating sickness.

Then in 1993, an outbreak of a remarkably similar syndrome occurred among the Navajo people in the region of Gallup, New Mexico. This episode, known as the "Four Corners outbreak" after the region of the south-western USA in which it was located, turned the attention of sweating sickness investigators towards its causative agent: Sin Nombre virus. ("Without Name") Sin Nombre is a hantavirus, a member of a group of viruses that were mostly previously known in Europe for causing a kidney failure syndrome, and a cousin of several tropical fever viruses transmitted by biting insects. The new disease was given the name hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS).

We know that the climate of Europe was becoming progressively colder from the late middle ages onwards. Perhaps some subtle change in rodent ecology made life harder for the virus. For instance, the Four Corners HPS outbreak was linked to the El Niño climatic oscillation.

If you aren't worried yet, you should be. There has been a scary mystery illness in history. The scary mystery illness is associated with heat; it disappeared with cooling. So, in our modern associative world, global warming might well result in the return of a scary disease, maybe the sweating sickness. And the sweating sickness is a disease that, while not understood at all, is scary. Warming. A mystery illness that is scary. 

Please don't let any government officials know about this. Especially the CDC or we'll have weeping public officials everywhere. And new, fierce, Chicken Little Legislation.

We'll probably all end up with the military quartered in our homes, just for  safety's sake.