plane back to Guangzhou. I killed some hours in the airport there, paying more yuans for a ham sandwich and two lattes than I’d spent on a week’s meals in the cafés and noodle parlors of Guilin. Then I boarded my onward flight. In the row beside me were two young Japanese tourists, a couple, possibly returning from a romantic vacation amid the hotels, parks, malls, markets, restaurants, and crowded streets of Guangzhou or other cities of southern China. They took their seats unobtrusively and settled in for the short ride to Hong Kong. Maybe they felt a bit cowed by their own adventurousness and relieved to be headed home to a tidier nation; maybe they remembered the news stories about SARS. I didn’t intrude on them with questions. I wouldn’t have noticed them at all, except they were both wearing surgical masks.
Yes, I thought, if only it were that simple.
V
THE DEER, THE PARROT,
AND THE KID NEXT DOOR
41
Although the drumbeat has quickened in recent decades, the emergence of new zoonotic diseases isn’t unique to our era. Three stories exemplify that point.
Q fever. Sixty years before Hendra, sixty years before Vic Rail’s horses started dying in that suburb of Brisbane, a very different sort of pathogen made its first recognized spillover in almost the same locale. It wasn’t a virus, though in some measure it behaved like one. It was a bacterium, but unlike most other bacteria. (An ordinary bacterium differs from a virus in several obvious ways: It’s a cellular organism, not a subcellular particle; it’s much larger than a virus; it reproduces by fission, not by invading a cell and commandeering the cell’s machinery of genetic copying; and it can usually be killed by antibiotics.) This new bug caused an illness that resembled influenza or maybe typhus. The earliest cases, occurring in 1933, were among abattoir workers in Brisbane, whose jobs involved slaughtering cattle and sheep. The affliction they suffered, known initially as “abattoir fever” among the doctors who treated them, acquired a more opaque name that stuck: Q fever. Never mind, for the moment, the origin of that name. The most notable thing about Q fever is that, even now in the age of antibiotics, for reasons related to its anomalous biology, it’s still capable of causing serious devilment.
Psittacosis. Around the same time as Q fever emerged, in the 1930s, another peculiar bacterial zoonosis hit the news. This one also had links to Australia, but its scope was global, and it seems to have first reached the United States by way of a shipment of diseased parrots from South America. That was in late 1929, just in time for the Christmas season of parrot-giving. One unlucky recipient was Lillian Martin, of Annapolis, Maryland, whose husband bought her a parrot from a pet store in Baltimore. The bird keeled over dead on Christmas Day, a bad omen, and Mrs. Martin started feeling ill about five days later. Psittacosis is the medical name for the ailment she contracted; it passes from birds (especially those of the order Psittaciformes, meaning parrots and their kin) to humans, causing fever, aches, chills, pneumonia, and sometimes death. “Parrot fever” was the label under which it raised alarm in the United States during early 1930, when people exposed to those unhealthy imported birds started getting sick, especially in Maryland. PARROT FEVER HITS TRIO AT ANNAPOLIS was a typical headline, bruiting a story that ran in The Washington Post, on January 8, about Lillian Martin and two of her close relatives. Three days later, also in The Post: BALTIMORE WOMAN’S DEATH BLAMED ON PARROT DISEASE. Over the next several months psittacosis would become a national concern, causing enough reaction or overreaction that one commentator called the whole thing an example of “public hysteria,” commensurate with flagellation zeal and St. John’s fire in the Middle Ages.
And then there’s Lyme disease. This seems to be a more recent version of the spooky-new-bacteria phenomenon. In the mid-1970s, two alert mothers in Lyme, Connecticut, near Long Island Sound, noticed that not only their children but a high incidence of other youngsters nearby had been diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The odds were against any such concentration of cases occurring by chance. Once the Connecticut Department of Health and the Yale University School of Medicine had been alerted, researchers noticed that these arthritis diagnoses coincided with a particular pattern of skin rash—a red ring, spreading outward from a point—known to occur sometimes around tick bites. Ticks of the genus Ixodes, commonly