Christian Drosten “has just finished New Year’s Eve. He slept badly and only briefly. It’s the first of January, he’s on his balcony and enjoys the fresh air. ”When he called, he heard of an accumulation of severe pneumonia in Wuhan. Was it really like that? The thick volume by Philipp Kohlhöfer is composed like a novel with changing locations and protagonists. The title Pandemics. How viruses change the world however, refers to a non-fiction book. Two genres mix in an unusual way.
In the Kalkberg near Bad Segeberg
The author is a science journalist. He was busy researching – the list of sources comprises over 50 tightly printed pages – but above all Philipp Kohlhöfer is a talented storyteller. You can feel how he lets himself be carried away by his writing. He sees an audience in front of him, to whom he is communicating something that he also wants to convince. To do this, he brings several scientists to his side, whom he has interviewed, but whom he is here shaping into novel characters, as it were.
Right at the beginning we meet the doctor Thushira Weerawarna, who in Transylvania, Romania, has to watch a patient suffocate him, and Mirjam Knörnschild, who comes very close to bats in a limestone cave in Bad Segeberg. Is she infected? “There are many coronaviruses, in dogs, cats and in guinea pigs and in bats from the Segeberg district, as well as in butterflies in Brandenburg and Bavaria.”
It really is an amazing book. The author provides a wealth of facts, many of which are previously unknown to the general public. Whereby his “trick”, as I said, is to connect them to those people who have explored them. We can be there – whether in 2020 in a video conference of the WHO or in 1892, when Dimitri Iwanowski researched the mosaic disease of tobacco plants in St. Petersburg and became the first virologist in the world. Swine flu, Spanish flu, Ebola, SARS – you get an idea of how pandemics arise. Of course, also about how they can be combated. For example, how vector vaccines are made and how the idea came about. A smallpox virus as a vaccine carrier? That sounds scary at first, but the weakened virus is only a “service provider” and the method has not just been invented, but has been tried and tested for a long time. Also in veterinary medicine – Prof. Dr. med. vet. habil Gerd Sutter from the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Munich takes us into his laboratory.
Sutter is now head of the virology department at the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which is responsible for the evaluation and approval of vaccines. How are they tested? How do they affect? How about the side effects? At this point, at the latest, it becomes clear that this book is also a confidence-building measure in view of “a situation that seems incalculable to many and does not allow any clear predictions”, as the sociologist Armin Nassehi explains in an interview. We understand: Conscientious researchers were and are at work in this field, highly specialized people. And this is what the mass of the population now encounters with their fears and their will to persevere, preferring to simply “let everything go”. There are all sorts of strange theories going on, spurred on by social networks.
“Assuming evil to the state and not trusting its institutions is not a particularly innovative idea,” writes Kohlhöfer. It was like that with the cholera epidemic in the 19th century. Doctors were seen as “conspirators” who allegedly want to decimate an “overpopulation”, trigger inflation through quarantine and thereby become even richer. Protection from the epidemic was “organized like a war”, but the deaths were taking on gigantic proportions. In Berlin, Robert Koch took over the command, had schools, theaters, shops, baths closed and “dance pleasures” prohibited. And most of all, he recognized the source of the evil because he was researching tuberculosis and cholera bacteria. What was previously unknown: The cholera bacterium only becomes really dangerous to us when it “becomes infected” with a virus.
We are constantly attacked by something
In various places we bend over sick beds to read. Those who suffer, die or recover have names. There are documented cases that have made a great contribution to research. Because first someone has to be infected before the pathogen can be searched for. Virology laboratories from many countries are networked in the “European Virus Archive Global”.
In addition to the known viruses, which are now relatively easy to produce chemically, as the Berlin microbiologist Eckard Wimmer explains, there are constantly new ones that become dangerous when they are transmitted from animals to humans. “Four percent of all mammals live in the wild, sixty percent in stables.” The rest, that’s us, who are in constant contact with them through our food alone. “Viruses don’t disappear with their hosts, they look for new habitats.” So it doesn’t really stop “after Corona”, as it will be at all. “Something is constantly attacking us, it’s been like that from the beginning of life,” says Kohlhöfer.
And with “Omikron” we are already threatened by a new mutation. How dangerous is it for us? Does the previous vaccination protection work against it? You want valid answers, and you want them right away. It is an advantage of Kohlhöfer’s book to show research as a process that also thrives on doubts and errors.
Pandemics. How viruses change the world Philipp Kohlhöfer S. Fischer 2021, 544 pp., 25 €
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