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kottke.org posts about disease

The White Death

John Green recently teamed up with Kurzgesagt for a video on one of the world’s deadliest diseases: tuberculosis.

The white death has haunted humanity like no other disease following us for thousands, maybe millions of years. In the last 200 years it killed a billion people โ€” way more than all wars and natural disasters combined. Even today it’s the infectious disease with the highest kill count.

The maddening bit is that tuberculosis is curable…it’s just that the cure is not equally distributed around the world.

4,000 people died of tuberculosis yesterday, and we simply don’t have to accept a world where so many of us still die of a disease we know how to cure. The White Death has been with us for millions of years. It is time to continue our journey without it.

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Crash Course Lecture: The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time

In this Crash Course video, author and “TB-hater” John Green takes a deep dive into tuberculosis.

This is the story of the deadliest infectious disease of all time. It’s been with us for 3 million years, since before humans were homo sapiens. We have evidence of it in the mummies of ancient Egypt, and it’s mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

We’ve made extraordinary medical advances. Vaccines, antibiotics, and clean water have saved millions of lives. And yet despite that, in 2022, this disease killed more people than malaria, typhoid, cholera, homicide, and war…combined.

It has gone by many names. In ancient China, it was known as huaifu, meaning “destroyed palace.” In ancient Hebrew, “schachepheth,” meaning wasting away. The 19th-century term: “consumption,” for the way it seemed to consume the body. Today, we call it tuberculosis.

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The Mania Over Gay Flesh-Eating Super-Staph

People are going whole-hog bananas today over a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, in which gay men arriving at hospitals and clinics in San Francisco and Boston were showing high incidences of truly nasty drug-resistant staph infections. Let’s panic! After all, Matt Drudge is teasing the story with an invented quote: “STRAIN OF SUPERBUG ‘MAY BE NEW HIV’…” But that language doesn’t actually appear anywhere, much less in the Reuters summary to which he links; it does not even appear in this story that uses that phrase as a headline. Mmm, fake horror! The study began sampling patients four years ago. If this was the new super-plague, we’d all be neck-deep in boils already.


Design Observer has a suggested alert system

Design Observer has a suggested alert system for the avian flu.


People, especially Americans, are so well-fed and

People, especially Americans, are so well-fed and taken care of prenatally and from 0-2 years of age that the population is growing taller, getting heavier, living longer, and is much less likely to suffer from chronic diseases.


Underground culture watch: “bug chasers” are men

Underground culture watch: “bug chasers” are men who are actively looking to get infected with AIDS, or “initiated into the brotherhood”.

Update: When the RS article came out three years ago, it was taken apart by Andrew Sullivan in Salon and by Dan Savage. (thx jonathan, steven, scott, and tycho)


Even though avian flu is under control

Even though avian flu is under control in some areas of Southeast Asia, Indonesia “has witnessed more bird flu deaths than any other country in 2006”.


Through vaccination and vigilance, the avian flu

Through vaccination and vigilance, the avian flu is under control in the Southeast Asian countries that were hardest hit with the disease. See also this map of avian flu reports.


Blog about the small village of Nata

Blog about the small village of Nata in Botswana that’s documenting the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS there.


Scientists have found a probable carrier for

Scientists have found a probable carrier for the ebola virus: fruit bats. According to the WHO, ebola causes death in “50-90% of all clinically ill cases”.


Nice overview of what you need to

Nice overview of what you need to be worried about regarding the bird flu. Right now for your typical non-bird-handling person? Nothing much to worry about.


Two of the biggest pessimists in the

Two of the biggest pessimists in the business, Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil, outline their case for not releasing the genome for the 1918 influenza virus. “The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.”


Flu Wiki has lots of information on

Flu Wiki has lots of information on the avian (bird) flu.


Bats may be the source of SARS. “

Bats may be the source of SARS. “Researchers found a virus closely related to the Sars coronavirus in bats from three regions of China”.