What happens if we don start paying attention to research and vector control and surveillance immediately?
The best way to understand what is at stake here and how it will affect us as Americans is to look at HIV. It’s interesting to me, having begun covering HIV before it had a name and before we even knew it was infectious in 1981, and having lived in Africa shortly before then, not knowing AIDS was already there but having seen the behaviors that have resulted in the rapid spread of this disease. It’s interesting to me to see that we have to get 22 years into this epidemic before government institutions at the highest level begin to appreciate the catastrophe for what it is. That means that we have given these microbes a 22-year head start. We are only just beginning, just at the first baby steps of beginning to understand what it is going to take to bring this epidemic under control. We may not even have time. We may have waited too long. But when we look at the kinds of scenarios that are now being promulgated by national security experts, historians, political analysts an so on. We ca
