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Modeling Epidemics (Parrot Fever, 1918 Flu, Plague)

I’ve written about high-profile diseases already (here, here, here, and many more). There’s something timeless about studying the way diseases spread and impact systems, especially when it comes to second-order effects. So let’s map out a few disease scares from the past century. Here’s a systems map look at parrot fever, 1918 flu, and modern-day bubonic plague.

I’m not including COVID-19 in the bunch since I’ve written about it frequently and there’s still a lot we don’t know about the system that led to its spread. Then again, there is also a lot we don’t know about the spread of the diseases below, but the perspectives on them are more static.

I decided to write this piece after seeing how hidden the pathways to illness can be and how straightforward the solutions can seem after the system is understood.

Psittacosis (Parrot Fever)

You’ve probably never heard of it, but in 1929, deaths from the then unknown disease psittacosis (also called “parrot fever”) scared a lot of people who thought it might be a new epidemic.

It took some sleuthing, but the commonality between people affected by this disease was their proximity to imported birds such as parrots and parakeets.

Keeping birds in the home as pets was a relatively new fashion. Salesmen sold birds door to door.

But even with importation of infected birds, we might have avoided the local spread of psittacosis if not for crowded conditions in pet stores and the easier spread of psittacosis among the birds, asymptomatic healthy seeming birds, and then close conditions between birds and human owners in the home.

Here’s a map of psittacosis flowing from wild populations to the pet owners.

Continue reading “Modeling Epidemics (Parrot Fever, 1918 Flu, Plague)”

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A Religion of Isolation (Pandemics Past and Present)

When a new topic overwhelms — as with coronavirus — it’s easy to take in a lot of noisy information. Information that isn’t helpful, accurate, or clear. With that in mind, and especially for those of you physically isolated in response to COVID-19, I present this (long) quote about the Dark Ages of Europe.

“Whatever reproach may, at a later period, have been justly thrown on the indolence and luxury of religious orders, it was surely good that, in an age of ignorance and violence, there should be quiet cloisters and gardens, in which the arts of peace could be safely cultivated, in which gentle and contemplative natures find an asylum, in which one brother could employ himself in transcribing the Aeneid of Virgil, and another in meditating the Analytics of Aristotle, in which who had a genius for art might illuminate a martyrology or carve a crucifix, and in which he who had a turn for natural philosophy might make experiments on properties of plants and minerals. Had not such retreats been scattered here and there, among the huts of a miserable peasantry, and the castles of a ferocious aristocracy, European society would have consisted merely of beasts of burden and beasts of prey. The Church has many times been compared by divines to the ark of which we read in the Book of Genesis: but never was the resemblance more perfect than during that evil when she alone rode, amidst darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath which all the great works of power and wisdom lay entombed, bearing within that feeble germ from which a second and more glorious civilization was to spring.”

Continue reading “A Religion of Isolation (Pandemics Past and Present)”

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Coronavirus Consequences

As a rule, I don’t cover breaking news on this site. Plenty of other sources do that. Instead, when I do write about current events I focus on looking at the effects that systems have generating unintended consequences. That’s why I’m only writing about the Wuhan novel coronavirus now, almost at the end of the declared 14-day lockdown period.

And what a story of systems.

While the novel coronavirus fatality rate is estimated at 2.2% versus 9.6% for SARS, some other qualities of this outbreak may make the illness more difficult to contain, namely the long period of incubation (14 day estimate) and the increased amount of travel, including international and domestic Lunar New Year travel shortly before the lockdown period.

If you want an example of how times have changed since earlier epidemics, watch this video from the English publication of China’s People’s Daily. Continue reading “Coronavirus Consequences”

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Selecting the Scalable Snapshot

One of the themes of these posts is that we unintended consequences of a change come from the way it scales.

It is also superficially easier to judge events as at risk of unintended consequences (easier, not more accurate) when there is an image — a snapshot — that represents risk.

So what are causes of difficulty when we make judgments? I’ll go into some examples.

After two back-to-back mass shootings in the US, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted something seemingly logical yet awful (shown later in post). Interestingly, people took offense and attacked him for the apparent logic (he later apologized). His offense: insensitively calling out and comparing the magnitude of different causes of death.

But the problem with Tyson’s tweet wasn’t that at all. Continue reading “Selecting the Scalable Snapshot”

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Systems for Spreading (Diseases and Religions)

How do things spread? How fast can something spread? To how many people can one “infected” person transmit a condition?

Let’s look at some of the unintended consequences of systems for spreading in diseases and religions. And I’m not saying that diseases are religions or religions are diseases, just that they have similarities in the way they spread. Understanding that helps us understand our history. Continue reading “Systems for Spreading (Diseases and Religions)”

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A City Too Familiar (the Spread of Disease)

The impact of diseases and epidemics on human life is as old as humanity. Disease is mentioned in texts thousands of years old, its presence changed political and economic history, cultural habits, and even morality. But often we think of disease as a stranger. It’s something that comes from somewhere else. But the systems that are in place affect how easily disease moves among us.

Let’s look into how disease impacts us with unintended consequences. First, a view from fiction.  Continue reading “A City Too Familiar (the Spread of Disease)”

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Diet, Dying, and Demographics

Why study the below unintended consequence? When we seek to understand consequences of our actions and the hidden complexity that underlies them we can make better decisions. One set of decisions that everyone participates in throughout life is choice of diet. The impact of what we consume on a daily basis is often only felt many years later — and can be an accident of birth.

Life expectancy has increased in most of the world over the last century due to many factors, a big one being lower infant and child mortality. Accounting for that and other factors, as the percentage of a population that is “old” grows larger, some populations have a natural advantage in the way they age. Some of this advantage can be attributed to dietary traditions that were adopted before a significant percentage of the population was older (65+). Continue reading “Diet, Dying, and Demographics”