Living in a post-pandemic world

FALLS VILLAGE  — James Shepherd painted a bleak picture of the future in terms of infectious diseases at a Salisbury Forum talk at Housatonic Valley Regional High School Friday, Dec. 1.

Shepherd, a faculty physician at Yale University and a farmer living and working in Sharon, opened by noting he had given the same basic talk to a group of first-year medical students at Yale a few days earlier.

He spoke of the difficulties facing Yale-New Haven Hospital staff in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of these was caused by his beard.

Before the talk, when asked about the full beard he sports instead of the clean-shaven publicity photo that was on the auditorium screen, Shepherd laughed and said he injured his shoulder in an accident involving a tractor.

Unable to shave, he allowed the beard to grow.

During the talk, he said hospital administrators asked everyone to remove facial hair so as not to interfere with masks.

Shepherd said his natural instinct was to refuse, so he wound up wearing a cumbersome and odd-looking combination of a respirator and mask. He displayed a photo, next to his publicity shot.

This get-up did not do much to reassure already frightened patients in isolation units at the hospital.

Shepherd recounted some of the notable events that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said the virus was identified fairly quickly “for the most of the world.”

Things moved slower in the U.S., however. Shepherd said the decentralized nature of the U.S. health care system accounted for a lot of the delay, as did the Trump administration’s decision to leave the World Health Organization (WHO).

Shepherd also said the bulk of the useful data he and his colleagues used came from the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) and the WHO.

Shepherd compared the COVID-19 pandemic with the HIV pandemic.

He said HIV, which can cause AIDS, has jumped from primates to humans at least 12 times in the last 120-140 years in Africa.

The likely cause is the hunting and consumption of “bush meat,” he said.

What facilitated the spread of the disease was human activity. “The event that made it a pandemic was the development of Kinshasa, Congo, into a major trade center” by the colonial Belgian government.

Shepherd then segued into a discussion of climate change and infectious diseases.

He said he prefers to call it global warming “because that’s what is happening.”

He said global warming plus increased urbanization leads to decreased biodiversity. The combination then results in a decrease in animal and plant life and an increase in the numbers of insects (such as mosquitoes and ticks ) and the animals that host them (such as mice and deer).

Shepherd noted that ticks previously confined to areas in the southern U.S. have now made their way north as far as Canada, bringing with them diseases such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Southern tick-associated rash illness.

He blamed increasing urbanization and a concomitant decrease in biodiversity for the phenomenon.

“In short order things will change as a result of our environment changing rapidly around us.”

Shepherd said he told the Yale first-year students that they would be dealing with a much larger group of infectious diseases in the future.

Shepherd was not sanguine about international efforts to combat global warming.

Instead he made a plug for his Sharon neighbor, Michelle Alfandari, co-founder of Homegrown National Park, which urges homeowners to plant native plants on their property.

Shepherd observed that some 80% of the U.S. is privately owned, and if the owners took steps to restore a proper natural balance, it would go a long way in combating the problems he foresees. 

To see a video of the talk go to www.salisburyforum.org.