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From the perspective of the book that is this website, the view of Bird Flu is different. Really, that is largely where this book started. The disease was entirely predictable by myself and others. The consequence in terms of genetics discussed here is not so common.
What this book says is that disease acts as a general selective effect. It selects against any weak link in a person's health. That just says that it culls out the weak and sick. Unfortunately, there is more to it than that for a few reasons, including population growth, travel and load.
Normally, if a disease kills its host too soon, the disease will die out before it can spread much. Really, the most successful diseases are ones like colds that are mostly just annoyances and where the host usually survives to spread it. In the case of the modern world with its unnaturally high human population and large amount of travel, even a highly deadly disease can spread. There are just a lot of hosts for it.
The consequence of a high population changes the ability of a disease to spread, but does not change human susceptibility to it. That is changing as well. The second main point of this book is that human genetics are deteriorating far faster than would be expected by most models. Both medicine and just the promiscuousness (or comfort) of the technological world has allowed a lot of people to survive that normally would not have in the past. It goes hand in hand with population growth. There is another factor causing genetic load that is not well known. That is recombination.
Normally, there are always individuals with health weaknesses that survive in every population. That is just normal, but it stays at a relatively constant rate generation to generation. In a case of a population where disease and other effects do not clean out the weak regularly, the rate of individuals with health defects will rise very rapidly. It may not appear so, because there the usual test, disease, is not acting. So when a disease does act, the result could be a very high mortality rate.
The problem with this is that even if a broad-spectrum vaccine were developed that could easily be given to everyone, it would just put off the problem and the eventual mortality rate would be higher. At a point, the common cold would become a killer disease. There are many other diseases as well just waiting to get their chances such as tuberculosis, whooping cough, cholera, typhus, staph and others that humans have temporarily managed to control.
So is there a solution to the twin problems of increased population number and increased susceptibility? Re-introduction of disease would be prohibitively expensive given the high cost of raising children in a technological society and besides, no one wants to see their children die.
Only by artificial genetic selection will we be able to survive disease in the future.
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