Prime Minister,
I see that Owen “Golden Rice” Paterson has finally deigned to visit Somerset, although not the flooded village that’s been at the centre of news reports just lately. Obviously he values his own skin more than he values first-hand knowledge, and so the village hairdresser, who probably doesn’t charge £90 for a trim, can’t be blamed for dismissing the visit as a publicity stunt. Paterson says the people are “right to be angry” as if their anger needed his permission! You bet they have the right to be angry, when it is your government that slashed great chunks off the flood defence budget in the face of climate change that has already proved over the last decade or so that our local weather is tending to be wetter and colder.
What the news isn’t reporting, though, is an aspect of the flooding that very few people will have considered – disease. Bubonic plague, in particular, needs to be highlighted because all four known pandemics were preceded by excessively heavy rain and cold, as a little research will prove. It makes sense, when you think about it. BP is carried by the fleas that infest rat colonies, and rats live mostly underground. The three pandemics that are well-known all occurred in civilised times, where people were gathered together in cities. All of them occurred in times when the welfare of ordinary people was increasingly being ignored by their governments, as the British people’s welfare is being ignored today by your government. Cities have sewers, and when it rains those sewers tend to fill beyond a level that the rats find tolerable. The rats therefore emerge onto the surface, carrying their disease-laden passengers with them, and they go about among humans, feeding off our waste and burrowing into our habitation and storage spaces, and their fleas hop across from them to us, feeding from us and transferring the bacteria that cause BP. Just like the mosquitos that transfer the malaria bug to us, which were combatted with DDT by our Empire’s soldiers. More about DDT later.
The first properly documented pandemic was the Plague of Justinian. He was a 6th century Roman emperor who was, himself, a plague victim who survived. Procopius wrote that, at its peak, the plague was killing 10,000 people every day. Just like a Tory, though, Justinian was only interested in making sure that he received his tax revenues from the farmers who were too ill to work their fields, and not providing any support, being more interested in the wars he was waging abroad. Genetic studies point to China as having been the primary source of the contagion (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/health/01plague.html) and the outbreak is estimated to have killed around half the population of Europe. It returned in each generation until 750AD, but the original outbreak has been attributed to what is referred to as a “global climate downturn” in 535-536. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536) The outbreak is believed to have entered the Byzantine Empire (Turkey) from Egypt, which nation was also trading with central Asia, via the Red Sea, at that time.
Next on the list of notable pandemics is the (in)famous outbreak of the 14th century’s “Black Death,” which is believed to have wiped out between one and two thirds of the European population between 1347 and 1353. An estimated 75 to 200 millionpeople died in that outbreak, which is thought to have originated in the plains of central Asia, arriving in the Crimea in 1346. From there, trade links brought it via Turkey to the Mediterranean, and to the Black Sea ports, from where it spread like wildfire into northern Europe and the UK. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death) The following link shows the incidence of extreme weather events for the 14th century, including floods: https://www2.sci.u-szeged.hu/eghajlattan/akta99/051-064.pdf .
The third recorded pandemic is what is called the Third Plague, which started in the tropical (humid/wet) Yunnan Province, China, in 1855 and ended up killing large numbers of people in China and India. it seems unlikely that Burma (Myanmar) was unaffected, but I haven’t looked into it that deeply. The Plague arrived in British India because of the opium and tea trades that were at their height at that time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_plague_pandemic). There was a smaller outbreak in the overcrowded and unsanitary Hong Kong in 1894.
Water and the plague therefore are well-proven bedfellows.
Now look at the 1665 Plague in England. The nation was at war with the Dutch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1660s), and it is suggested by Pepys that the Plague may have been started by Dutch prisoners. There was also much international to-ing and fro-ing by ship to northern Europe, where the weather was resported to be foul. However, look at this chart and note the descriptions of the British weather, as well, in the years leading up to 1665: https://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1650_1699.htm . Lots of rain, along with cold winters, including a “severe frost in London” (Pepys) in August 1663, and bad harvests. This would have forced more rats up into the cities in search of food, and possibly warmth as well, to mingle with their shipborne cousins from Europe, and it can be seen that the Plague first started in January/February of that year. A full journal of the Plague Year was written by Daniel Defoe and can be found, free of charge, at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Journal-Plague-written-citizen-continued-ebook/dp/B0084B57VO/
There are still some 200 cases of Plague reported in Europe each year, and there’s only recently been an outbreak in one of the Stans that has access to Turkey via Iran, Azerbaijan etc, through the Black Sea ports. (Kazakhstan? Turkmenistan? I can’t remember offhand.)
Now: While we’re no longer at war with our European neighbours, and while we have (for the moment anyway, until you start ripping up the regulations) good import controls in terms of checks for pathogens and phytosanitary problems, it has to be noted that the descendants of the rats – and the fleas – of the 17th century are alive and well and living in a city near you. And now we have floods, colder winters, and short but toasty heatwaves. Thanks to welfare cutbacks, we also have people using less water because it’s now ridiculously expensive, meaning that personal and domestic hygiene standards are declining; we have councils restricting refuse collection to fortnightly rather than weekly, encouraging vermin infestation of our cities and towns; we have people being discouraged by government policy from visiting their A&E departments, just in case they receive a bill from the hospital, meaning that diseases of all kinds will increasingly go unreported; we have people who are not feeding themselves properly due to lack of income, meaning that their weakened metabolisms will transmit disease more readily than those of healthy people would.
In short, thanks to your beloved free market economy, we have a recipe for a disease catastrophe.
Presumably, though, your government will be as slow to act against this threat as previous governments were slow to act against the dangers of DDT. Banned by the Hungarians in 1958/9, it was eventually also taken off the safe list by the Americans in the mid-1970s. Yet the British government allowed its use to continue into the mid-1980s before declaring it unsafe for further use. And what do we now learn? That there’s a link between the use of DDT and the increased incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease! It has yet to be fully proven, but the indications are so far seen as being very strong. Lack of due diligence by the UK’s government is therefore most likely what has been responsible for the wave of Alzheimer cases that we are seeing today. The lawsuits, when the link is finally proven, should be seriously impressive.
I think you need to wake your ideas up and start reviewing the hidden dangers of flooding now, and not – like Paterson – simply using these disastrous events as photo opportunities.
Sincerely,
Darren Lynch
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/uk-set-freeze-amid-fears-more-floods-033409510.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_plague_pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-study-finds-pesticide-may-raise-risk-alzheimer-213241262.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
