Our distance from infectious diseases

An epidemic has brought earth-shaking changes to the world. The number of confirmed cases and deaths is refreshed every day. In order to stop the spread, cities around the world have been shutting down work and classes, restricting people's activities, and even blocking borders... Some people even described the current situation as "a rare sight in a lifetime", but as long as you read history carefully, It is not difficult to find that infectious diseases have never been far away from human beings, and the distance between us and infectious diseases is also closer than everyone thinks.

If you want to walk into this history, the book "The Time and Space of Epidemic Police: Those Infectious Diseases that Haunt Celebrities" may be a good entry.

Infectious diseases are never far away

As can be guessed from the title of the book, this work is about the history of celebrities, but the author believes that it is better to borrow the examples of celebrities to tell the shocking history of infectious diseases. And this tendency, the phrase on the cover of the book, "The history of mankind is itself the history of diseases, and infectious diseases are the protagonists of it", has actually been quite clear.

When it comes to infectious diseases, we have a lot of knowledge: influenza, dengue fever, cholera, plague, bird flu, SARS, etc., have long been familiar to everyone, but what everyone does not understand is actually how much they are related to these invisible infectious diseases. near. Therefore, when we follow the content of the book and dismantle the names in history step by step, such as how the fate of Zheng Chenggong, Alexander the Great, Li Zicheng, etc. is related to dengue fever, malaria and plague, it will be particularly shocking. The reason why this work can use infectious diseases to intervene in historical writing is that the writer himself is a person who understands diseases better than ordinary people. In addition to being a history and literature lover, the author Tan Jian-sho is also a physician, so he can combine medical knowledge with historical materials without losing interest.

Medical heart is more important than medical body

In "The Epidemic Alarm Time and Space", almost all infectious diseases that we know and do not know at present are discussed, but history is only a supporting role. What the author really wants to do is to teach us how to be human. Therefore, it will be mentioned in the book that if Zheng Chenggong could put aside the "troughs" that plagued his heart, adjust his mentality, and maintain a calm mind, he might be able to reduce the risk of illness; The soldier's condition is light, and the world's description of the "Spanish flu" may have been rewritten. And more importantly, he raised a question in the book: Why are humans entangled with bacteria and viruses? Why are there more and more uninvited guests in the epidemic spectrum?

Dr. Tan cited scientific evidence and gave two answers: First, as human beings have more and more opportunities to destroy and come into contact with nature and living things, the chances of pathogens that originally exist in animals or the environment can infect humans also increase accordingly; The second is that pathogens become stronger and stronger in the war with the human immune system and pharmaceuticals, and mutate and mutate. Whether it is the former or the latter, the only constant is that in the foreseeable future, human beings will inevitably continue to dance with infectious diseases. What we need to learn is how to treat animals kindly and respect the environment. How weak and insignificant.

"If you can understand the doctor's words, it means that he is serious about conveying this message." Earlier, such a punchline circulated on social platforms. In fact, the thinking in it can also be applied to Dr. Tan's work. Only by drawing lessons from history, recognizing the distance between human beings and infectious diseases, and equipping ourselves psychologically and physiologically, can we continue to defeat various infectious diseases.

Originally published in "Yiwenqing"