Mark Woolhouse
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Mark Woolhouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The three pandemics I've lived through in my lifetime, the HIV-AIDS pandemic, which is caused by an RNA virus, the swine flu pandemic, another RNA virus,
And then, of course, the COVID pandemic, the third RNA virus.
The main thing seems to be their diversity.
We don't know how many different species of RNA viruses there are out there.
Certainly thousands.
Some estimates put it in the millions, an extraordinarily high number.
And humans are exposed to them all the time.
I mean, fortunately, only a very, very small fraction have made it across the species barrier they've got into humans.
239 by our count.
But there's always the potential to find another one that's capable of infecting humans.
So the number has built up steadily.
The first RNA virus was the yellow fever virus that was discovered in humans in 1901.
It accelerated in the 1960s and it's continued at more or less the same rate since then.
There was an American-funded virus-hunting expedition to Central Africa that was very successful and turned up such a huge number of viruses that it's actually visible in the historic data.
Genetic change is undeniably an important part of it.
But some of it is a change in habitat.
So there's been major epidemics, particularly in South America, actually, with Zika virus or a push virus and also some dengue and yellow fever.
going on there which appears to be ecological changes the particular group of viruses they're spread by mosquitoes so the mosquitoes are more common in that area now than they used to be and the virus has got into cities so ecological change is another very important part of it
So of those 239 in the catalogue, only a couple of dozen...
are confined to humans.
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