Did Alexander the Great die from West Nile virus?
Interesting proposal — there’s an upcoming article to be published by the CDC, by J.S. Marr and C.H. Calisher, whose conclusions appeared in the last Times Sunday Magazine as part of an article on the research of John Grieve, a retired police commissioner, into what might have befallen Alexander. Excerpt: It was recorded that, as Alexander approached Babylon, an omen occurred. He saw some ravens pecking at each other in the sky. According to Plutarch, “They fell to his feet and they were dead.” To modern science, of course, omens are superstitious nonsense. But rejecting superstition need not mean dismissing the event itself. Suppose birds really did fall to the ground. What then? As it happens, birds in America are doing exactly that, right now. It began in 1999 in the Bronx zoo, when both captive and wild birds – particularly crows, owls and raptors – began to die in the first stages of an epidemic that now threatens the whole of the US, Canada and Mexico (there have even been a few
