The Red Velvet Lawyer

Timeless Lessons About Human Behavior When I first saw the pandemic spread West from Wuhan as I sat in my Qatar office, the New York Times published a list of seven books on pandemics .  Being an academic who likes to use "teachable moments" to increase my own knowledge and understanding, I ordered all of them.  They arrived in Doha just as officials ordered educators to start distance learning on March 10.  Safe at home and free of many campus-related responsibilities, I now had more time to read, and so I did. I started with the book on Ebola in 20th century US, then cholera in 19th century England, then the Black Plague in 14th century France, then malaria across the centuries and across the world, then the Spanish flu in 20th century US, and most recently smallpox in the US during the Revolutionary War period.  I am now reading a book that asks how we plan to handle future pandemics .  I still need to read the book on HIV/AIDS , a ...

Eighty-Seven Years of Research  Unlocked Some of the Mysteries of the Virus  that Killed 50 Million People Worldwide I finished the book on the Spanish flu: "Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused it" by Gina Kolata.  Over the last two months, I have read books on Ebola, Cholera, the Black Plague, and malaria.  My reading list still includes books on HIV, smallpox, and the risk of coming pandemics.  Scientists have learned that the virus causing the Spanish flu was genetically similar to viruses found in birds.  It mutated in pigs, then infected humans. The Spanish flu virus was probably circulating (in a less virulent form) in the population for several years before the deadly 1918 outbreak that killed 50 million worldwide. The weird mortality curve , with younger people dying at higher rates, may reflect that older people had antibodies from the 1890 flu (developed wh...