POV: Battling Ebola. It’s Our Problem, Too
Original article from: BU Today posted on August 8, 2014. By Paul Duprex
I can’t hear the three words “point of view” without instantly thinking of my dad! “Here’s my point…” is probably one of his favorite phrases, and I guess he’s not alone. Doesn’t everyone have some point or other they want to get across in conversation, on the Internet, in the press? So let’s cut to the chase, here’s my first point and it’s short and snappy: I do not have a death wish. We will return to my father and his points later on.
Second point, I am fascinated by viruses! As nature’s nanomachines, they are incredibly diverse and come in more “flavors” than all the plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and other unicellular organisms on earth put together. Why? Because as the nursery rhyme says, “Big fleas have little fleas, upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.” Long before we knew what they were, we saw what they did. Paralysis and, if you survived, lifelong disability due to polio; foaming and snapping animal jaws and the deadly hydrophobia in humans infected by rabies virus; the death of tens of millions in the 1918 influenza pandemic; and so on. As invisible, transmissible harbingers of disease, it’s really no wonder they don’t have such a great press, why the general public knows so little about them, and why they engender such fear.