Panel Discussion, continued...
Q: What is the significance of an organism that kills its host?
GIRARD: Actually, that really is an interesting question. Essentially, that's like a failure of that pathogen. It's like an ultimate failure if they actually require the host. I guess they have to have some other means as they go through after the death of host being maintained so they can be transmitted to another host or there is enough of infection going on that's maintained. But most, philosophically you'd say that that would be a failure of the pathogen to produce the lethal infection. .
ROTHSCHILD: That's right. That indicates a fairly recent pathogen in evolution. if they expect evolutionary stability, they had better ease up on the host or they're not going to spread.
MODERATOR: I think a lot of times what is happening with that, essentially when we say recent it means it's jumping from another organism into the human populations that we monitor. So if you have something, I think they talk about some of the parasitic diseases like the schistosomes or whatever in Africa. One of the big problems in getting rid of that is that it resides in the whole animal population, the elephants and everything. It doesn't do the elephants much harm. It's a parasite and they live with it. But then when it jumps from its normal host, for example when the vector bites a human, it
nails us because it hasn't had a long evolutionary history with us.
Q: The question is about recent reports of carbon dioxide build up as a
greenhouse gas and it may be less than we thought.
ROTHSCHILD: Sure, I didn't see that particular report but I will say that part of the problem is there is annual variability in carbon dioxide. It depends where you are. But there is also a very big political component to these sort of proclamations because if you say there is a build up there are all sorts of political ramifications in terms of control on industries. Of course, industries don't like that. That's why there are people really into this radon thing, because control has nothing to do with industry. So I think you should take some of these with a little bit of a grain of salt and look who is behind all this and what they get out of it. I think it's like a lot of other environmental damage that you have to sort of look at the risk versus the benefits. Say we're wrong about it, we're in big trouble. Say we haven't done any thing and we're wrong. We're in trouble. But say well, yeah but
there wasn't anything but we still controlled emissions, that's probably a
safer way to go. But for some, that's an economic problem.
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