A plague on all our houses.

• Author: Adams, Clayton
• Position: Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them - Book Review

Mark Jerome Walters, Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them (Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2003).

We are not so much victims of nature as of our own actions. And these we have the power to change.--Mark Jerome Walters, at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Oct. 17, 2003.

In 1999 Enrico Gabrielli became the first known victim of West Nile encephalitis in the western hemisphere. A resident of Queens, New York, he had apparently never been to Africa.

In Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them, veterinarian and journalist Mark Jerome Walters explains the mystery this way: Exceptionally hot and windy weather in the Middle East in the summer of 1998 caused a flock of storks to abandon their seasonal migration from Europe to Africa. Landing in Israel, overheated and exhausted, many of the birds succumbed to a virus that they normally harbor with little consequence. Shortly thereafter it was found that local flocks of geese were dying of West Nile. A number of human infections surfaced as well. Somehow, perhaps by human, pet bird, or stowaway mosquito, this viral strain made its way to Kennedy International Airport in Queens--a global intersection of travel and trade, surrounded by rivers and wetlands that serve as a breeding ground for insects and wildlife, and a stop along a major American flyway for migratory birds. Queens, Walters says, is a "gigantic petri dish."

Like the Middle East the previous year, the summer of 1999 in New York was unusually hot and dry, leaving unflushed standing water in storm sewers and providing ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes, the primary vector for West Nile. Mosquitoes, according to Walters, generally prefer to feed on birds, but will settle for humans. One of these likely bit Gabrielli in August and infected him. Gabrielli ultimately survived his bout with West Nile, but hundreds of other victims along the viral plume (traced by birds' interconnected migratory flight routes throughout North America) have not.

West Nile is an example of what Walters calls "ecodemics," and Six Modern Plagues is a highly readable, if sobering, collection of parables relating how humankind is causing radical change in the natural world, facilitating the mutation and spread of known diseases and creating the conditions for the emergence of new epidemics. Employing...