David Quamman and his boook - The Chimp and the River

David Quammen's The Chimp and the River



Commentary

By

Sampson I.M Onwuka

The growing need some of the daring problems of infections leads us back to the new books and new realities, with intent at helping several communities of interest in any field adjust to new ideas about an outbreak and how best to curare such epidemic.

No story is anymore compellingly than the general treatise for HIV, loosely epidermic and to some extent pandemic dealing with the problems of human immune deficiency and gradual if not sudden death of the patient. There is reason why the preventive interest of the vaccination has failed, why there is lack of interest in leading new grounds in medicine and in that direction.

Perhaps it is Obama Care and its audacity or that it came too late to healthcare, or perhaps he is just surviving a tough year with a lot at his table. 

 

There is perhaps a better reason such interest lax and why academic interpretation for the basic knowledge on medicine had to be re-interpreted for it seems that Mendel's theory and Charles Darwin's influential thesis on human and biological evolution determined the course of medicine in the last 100 years and has since dogged our approach to vaccination and to virus.

This new book by David Quammen deserves a mention, for its cursory glance invoke similar themes of Spillover by David Quammen to a point that it is not wrong to but I doubt he's position will even change on HIV and its origins, especially the inversion to the Virus' origin as Africa. His case on HIV in his book, Spillover, is biological sensitive information but do not generate enough dogma to illicit public opinion and dissent needed for intellectual trade-tackle.

One of the better books on the spiral effects of HIV at virion stage and why neglect is dangerous at any period is a book 'My Own Country; by Abraham Verghese.He probes into the delicate issue of HIV - especially among sexual deviant in Tennessee and those who suffer from the  problems of neglect in El Paso Texas. Some of the lasting information on this book is the premier issue of HIV from Primates, which we discover in David Quammen.

We cannot therefore pretend that the reasons for HIV profligate is based on anything other human activity, much of it neglect, that even if this was treated in the new book, it wouldn't matter so much on the prejudice that the current dogma on HIV is misleading and the reason why the virus still profligate in spite of the drugs available is lack of due knowledge on the origins of HIV.

The treatment is different matter but I don't recommend vaccination.

If HIV originated from other primates and Spillover to humans - it will not suffice the testicles of men and those of primates. Blood types are different so also human approach foreign entities.

 

Yet this is not the case, not nearly the case, that many few books reviewed, especially a new book on Polio virus and Jonas Salk, but this is a tackle on the damaging influence of institutional error which has stagnated the progress of Final Chapters on HIV.

If we borrow from Spillover by the same author David Quammen who grew up in Chicago, as a measure of 'How AIDS Emerged', we will not fail to suggest that the issue of Edward Hooper's The River concerning the Cameron river basin where Chimps and human made contact more than once arise in his book.

Perhaps David Quammen career may end as started with surveys on biological life of creatures, with passions for origins and evolutionary pathways, but if one bound ties to another, he would be a better scientist to reconsider the nature of HIV as a blood cancer induced by the actions of a profligate virus, that a lentivirus such as HIV is a slow virus which couldn't have passed from Chimps to Human. It's science, it takes a while for us to begin to understand.

Perhaps Quammen and Dr. Susan C. Ball may have considered these possibilities, but from Quammen and his essays, he was learning too close to Thomas Curtis and his essays on the work of Hilary Kaprowski.

The enigma behind the Polio virus and monkeys and its solution is exercised, and perhaps other recent publications on HIV including a keel from Dr. Beatrice Hahn may add meaning to our understanding. Such dogma as better explicated by Edward Hooper and The River where he argued on Chimps as the origin of HIV.

At last perhaps, the disease called HIV would be solved and the puzzle well known, but this happens - before the final Chapters, there is need to look at the origination of the Virus and 'HOW AIDS EMERGED' in this case by David Quammen.

One, cannot resist the temptation of stating that the rest of the world suggest that more than $100 billion dollars has not being spent on HIV treatment and discovery - perhaps a larger sum since its beginning, and perhaps much more will be spent in the market and in this putting an end to the virus.

What scientist have failed to do is break pattern with his past, for it seems that Hooper's book in Journalistic and not scientific. But at the absence of alternative theories, we have not failed to embrace the facts as accurate.

It is here many of us quarrel over the problems we still experience with social psychology has a tendency to spoil for a few hundred thousand when the end is really possible.

 

I think there is something institutional in the resource allocation but beyond blame on the origins of the virus and its practical nature is the reality that the dick-head virus is still elusive and at large.