Of microbes and men

Which disease are you most scared of catching: Ebola or influenza? Before I read this medical memoir, I would have said Ebola. Now, I’d say flu. As Dr Ali S. Khan points out, Ebola is fairly hard to catch; flu is fairly easy. And unlike wimpy man flu, proper flu can be a killer. You’ve heard of the Spanish flu, which killed 675,000 Americans a century ago. But did you know that influenza still kills up to 50,000 Americans every year?

Most pandemics are more like flu than Ebola: they don’t sound that spooky until they get out of hand. Yet instead, we worry about killer bugs which we stand much less chance of catching. When I was a teenager, I was terrified of contracting HIV, though the risk I faced was minuscule. I didn’t worry about meningitis, even though it had already killed one of my best friends. Thirty years later, meningitis nearly killed my teenage son.