History in the Headlines

This past week has been a whirlwind of professional activity and inspiration for me.

In the couple of days before last weekend, an international history conference held in Vlad brought me into a lot more contact with fellow historians than I've had the chance to enjoy in recent months. Thanks to that contact, I also got a leap start in work at the Far Eastern state historical archive. And, perhaps most surprising, the current topic of my research came back to bite contemporary Russians, quite literally.

The federal health agency in Russia recently declared an epidemic of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), with over 30,000 people across the country infected with the disease, and 15 dead. Apparently the region suffering the most is Novosibirsk, with 12 thousand cases of infection, about a third of which are children. The Far East, where TBE was first observed and studied by modern medical virologists exactly 70 years ago this summer, is not among the very worst hit, although the region surrounding the other major city out here, Khabarovsk, apparently has reported about 4,000 cases.

It's not very clear what explains this year's rise in the incidence of infection. Gennadii Onishchenko, former Minister of Health (he now heads the federal Consumer Rights Surveillance Agency, which performs some of the functions that the FDA and the CDC are responsible for in the US), says the unusually warm winter and unseasonably warm spring that hit in Siberia and the Eastern parts of Russia are partly to blame. He also calls attention to lax planning on the part of regional officials. Apparently every year health officials in the regions are supposed to order up doses of preventive vaccine and the immunoglobulin treatment that is really the only recourse once a person is infected with TBE. This year, perhaps because 2005 and 2006 saw a downturn in infections, Onishchenko says the regions ignored his calls for orders and now find themselves scrambling for treatment doses that were not manufactured.

Some reports note that localities often spray parks and recreational areas to keep the tick population down. A Kommersant newspaper article points to local officials skimping on such spraying or doing it too late this year. Personally I was surprised to hear that they try to spray at all to help prevent this disease, since in my understanding the danger of being bitten by an infected tick is much higher out "in nature," as Russians like to say -- in other words, outside of town, at a remove from urban areas, and in places that cover enough territory that I would assume spraying is really not a feasible option. But apparently now that this year's epidemic has been declared, officials are trying to be particularly vigilant about spraying around children's camps, as most of the young population heads out for the summer.

Evidently the joke among virologists right now is that the ticks' heightened activity is their way of marking the anniversary of modern medical scientists having taken note of their viral baggage. I wonder what Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber -- head of the 1937 medical expedition whose participants sleuthed out the fundamentals of the disease -- would think if he were here today?