Opinion  of the Month

What would happen  if the Sickness was NOW, in 1998, instead of the early 70's?

By Ewen and Gladys

Survivors was very much a product of it's time. The  early seventies in the UK were a time of great uncertainty and  even instability socially. And even fear. The Cold War was still  very cold, most people would rather be dead than red, and the  nuclear sword of Damocles still hung over us all. I would say  that the development and airing of Survivors was very  much a sample of the times, that maybe a lot of people did want  to look at alternative lifestyles, but it would take a disaster  to knock them out of their comfortable city-based existence.

So Gladys and I got talking, as you do, and we came up with  the subject for this rant.

I'm going to deal with it perhaps more from a scientific viewpoint,  although I'm going to have to watch myself now since Gladys started  reading a certain Old Austrian.(In-joke, she'll explain!)

My basic contention is that the Sickness, if it hit now, would  have a far different effect. We've always worked on the assumption  that the titles show us a biological warfare or medical experiment  gone wrong.

Scientifically, and technically, the Early 70s is Stone Age compared  to what we can do now in a laboratory. It's possible now to  do basic "genetic engineering" in a high-school lab,  and we rely on the "morals" of scientists to make sure  that what IS going on in Universities and research establishments is beneficial and not detrimental to  Humanity.

There arer two ways to look at the Sickness. The Scientific  and the Social.

Now, we are more aware of the possibilities of "global"  plagues, such as Ebola, but that awareness has not led to preparation.  At least, during the coldest times of the cold war, the Western  World had rudimentary civil defence preparations, which could  be as easily applied to "natural" disasters. But that's  not fashionable any more. CD doesn't attract the funding that it used to.

As tensions in the world increrase, (and god/ess knows, it's  getting worse in the last month with the nuclear proliferation  in India and Pakistan), the "desire" for weapons of  mass destruction as a national "bulwark" has grown.  Biological weapons are easy. As I am forever telling people,  given me a sample of Bacillus anthracis (anthrax), a high-school  cehmistry lab and a few clean dustbins and I could produce enough anthrax to wipe out the West Coast in a few weeks.

Think then what the resources of even a "poor" third-world  government could do, never mind a more "developed"  state.

Socially, think about what defines this later part of the  second millennium? Communication. In the 70's, it would still  take days to get reports from furtherest-flung parts of the world.  Now we have on the spot reports broadcast to satellites from  ground sations that can be carried in a briefcase. At the worst,  we could "watch" the Sickness develop live on CNN,  but we would also be far more aware of what was going on. Would  that lead to calm or panic?

A final thought,which I'd maybe like to look further at in  the discussion, is this. Computers now dominate our lives, to the  extent that perhaps "practical" skills are suffering.  How would Greg work now as a "practical" engineer  without the backup of a computer? What skills would Jenny have  that wouldn't involve the use of a computer. What of any of us?

Ewen

One of the first things that comes to mind when I think about  how Survivors or Survivor-Land would be different in l998  is, well, hamburger. Eggnog too, for that matter. What's the  connection? It's a more micro view of the scientific angle -  twenty plus years ago in the multi-generational household I grew  up in in Brooklyn, no one thought anything at all of snacking  on bits of raw hamburger while preparing dinner. Purchased at  the small neighborhood butcher shop, raw burger seemed to be  my great-grandmother's favorite food. If most of the elderly  have immune systems generally not as robust as younger folk,  my great-grandmother served as our own canary in the mine. No  raw hamburger made either her or any of the rest of us ill.  (In her case, it wouldn't dare!) During the Christmas season,  we used to relish fresh eggnog - homemade with raw eggs, naturally.

My stomach's doing flip flops even thinking about raw burger  and fresh eggnog in l998. The intervening twenty years have  brought us through a time of unparalled antibiotic abuse, resulting  in the flowering of some incredibly drug resistant strains of  microbial nasties - E.coli 0157, varities of salmonella, campylobacter  enteritis, listeria, shigella to name a few. And how could I  forget giardia lamblia, scourage of Adirondack water systems,  known locally as "beaver fever". This situation would mean a whole new ball game  for the survivors of any death plague in l998. If you survived,  you'd be without drugs fairly quickly, but in l998, with a much  nastier microbial world than in l975.

Medical advances in the years between l975 and l998 have resulted  in a higher percent of the population being able to survive,  or at least manage routinely with varying degrees of immune system  compromise. In a l998 death plague, incredible as it seems,  an even smaller percent of the population would be than likely  to survive. In the unlikely event an immune compromised person  survived the initial disease, their chances of being wiped out  in what I believe epidemiologists call the secondary wave are  greatly increased. Instead of one in 5,000 surviving, it might be more like 1 in 8 or 10,000.

Taking a micro view again, there seem to be many ordinary  household skills relatively common in l975 that are accomplished  by machine in l998. I know lots of folks with bread machines,  but few who could do it from scratch. Three of my fellow teachers  have new babies. In l998, not one of them has a blind idea of  how to deal with a proper diaper, whereas in l975, before Pampers and other disposable diapers  became widespread, just about everyone could manage with cloth.  It seems to me that much later than l998, say another 20 years  on, and even fewer people will have skills that will become vital  in Survivor-Land.

We'll leave it to the rest of you to weigh in on the computer angle, but I can't resist one parting shot. Several years ago  in Iowa City, a 50-something pilot was able to use skills he  learned flying propellor aircraft with no on-board computers,  to land when one of the plane's vital systems failed. As it  was, there was significant loss of life. Without the pilot's  pre-computer age know-how, everyone would have perished.

P.S. The book Ewen is referring to is Biochemistry by Albert  Lehninger, which has been my constant companion since March,  when he encouraged me to give it a shot despite momumental gaps  in my science education. He had faith in me when I didn't and has cheerfully answered my  questions and been my on-line tutor ever since. I've thanked  him any number of times, and do so again publicly here. When  you touch someone's life by teaching like that, it can start  a virtually endless chain. The least I can do now is to try  and pass it on to some of the kids I work with.

Gladys