How airbags transformed from a feared device to a must-have

 

On November 28, 1996, a ghastly accident occurred in the US state of Idaho. A woman drove her car into the back of another car. Her one-year-old daughter, Alexandra, who was in the front passenger seat beside her, was decapitated. Her head was thrown “through the door window and into the parking lot,” news agency AP reported.

But it was not a high-speed crash. The two cars were inside a mall parking lot. The culprit was the passenger airbag in Alexandra’s mother’s car, which had expanded with its full force at 320 kmph.

By April 1997, airbags that were meant to save lives had killed 63 Americans, of whom 38 were children. Alexandra’s case was the goriest, but all were equally tragic. The American public was scared. Some 35 million cars and light trucks already had airbags, and from September 1, 1997, front airbags were going to be mandatory across America. There was a clamour for a switch to disable airbags.

Yet, here we are 25 years later when the number of airbags in a car is considered a measure of safety. People want airbags, and transport minister Nitin Gadkari is pushing carmakers to oblige. So, how did the once-feared airbag become a must-have? Let’s rewind 50 years.

Cushion for the careless

We now see airbags as the primary safety device in a car, but 50 years ago that was not the case. The seat belt was, and perhaps still is, the single most important safety device in your car. Although seat belts in the 1960s and 1970s were basic lap belts (there was no strap across the shoulder), they did save lives.

As Ford’s executive vice-president Fred Secrest told a US Senate Committee hearing on August 1, 1973: belts alone were more effective than airbags “primarily because belts keep people from being thrown out of the car…. The chances of an occupant being killed in an accident are four times greater if the occupant is ejected from the car.”

A front airbag only protected the occupant from injuries that occurred due to impact on the steering wheel and the windshield, but a three-point belt (shoulder+lap) was just as good. Secrest said: “The airbag was intended to be a superior crash pad, to reduce the severity of the second collision impact of a lapbelted occupant in a frontal collision.”

So, why were automobile companies spending millions of dollars developing airbags, and why was the Senate committee so eager to see them installed in cars?

The problem was, although cars came fitted with belts people didn’t use them. In 1972, just 20% of American car users wore seat belts even though 38,000 car occupants had been killed and 3.5 million injured in crashes that year. Wearing a seat belt was not compulsory, and imposing a countrywide seat belt rule was politically difficult.

That’s why lawmakers were keen to have a “passive restraint system” that would protect careless car occupants in a crash. Insurance firm Allstate’s director of automotive engineering, Jack Martens, told the committee, “The airbag is a device that works in spite of occupant apathy.”

The insurance industry said 66% of accidents were front-end collisions, and 89% of accident deaths occurred in the front seats. So, the focus was on providing front airbags. In fact, a rule to make airbags mandatory in all cars sold in the US after August 15, 1975 was announced but it was stalled by a court over doubts regarding the design of crash dummies used to test airbags.

Lifesaver from the start

Nonetheless, carmakers had extensively tested airbags by 1973. About 2,000 GM and Ford cars had covered 55 million kilometres between them, and there had been 12 crashes in which their airbags had deployed. The results were largely excellent. In one case, a Mercury (Ford) driver had driven into the back of a parked car at 109kmph without a seat belt. He had slid forward in his seat and fractured his knee but was unharmed otherwise.

A minor girl had driven her car into a railway sign. The impact had broken the engine mountings but the girl and her friend had walked away from the crash unharmed.

It won’t be allowed today but some of the early airbag testing was done using baboons in place of dummies. And to ensure that the gas that inflated the airbag was not toxic, monkeys were exposed to it in a sealed space for 30 minutes.

Though the airbags performed well, they were very much a work in progress. There were doubts about their reliability in very cold places like Alaska, and concerns about permanent hearing loss from their explosive deployment. But all the testers who had been in an accident said they had never heard the bag deploy as the crash itself had been louder.

So, how did the ‘benign’ airbags of the early 1970s turn into somewhat dangerous and unpredictable devices by the 1990s?

Powerful to a fault

Well, this was a result of trying to protect occupants who did not wear belts. US guidelines at the time required that airbags should be able to protect an “average adult male not wearing a seat belt”. But the average US male was heavy. The current figure is about 200 pounds or 90kg.

To stop a heavy man from crashing into the steering wheel during an accident, the airbag had to deploy with great force. At the 1973 Senate committee hearing Ronald H Haas from GM’s Oldsmobile division had said that in a 50kmph crash, the time available to deploy was 0.04 seconds, or one twenty-fifth of a second.

The force was simply too much for lighter people, such as children and old women. While airbags were saving lives, they were known to sometimes cause arm fractures in drivers. If the car wasn’t moving fast, and the occupant’s body did not have enough forward momentum, the airbag “punched” their head backward with too much force. This could cause injuries to the face and the head, and also make the neck snap backwards. That’s how little Alexandra Greer had been decapitated.

The good news was that by the mid-1990s seat belt use had risen across the US, so experts advised depowering airbags by 20-35%. Another suggestion was to improve the way airbags were folded and tucked into the steering and the dashboard. The unravelling folds could be used to direct an airbag’s force away from the occupant.

Advanced sensors that could detect the speed of the vehicle, the size and weight of an occupant, and whether they were belted or not, also helped in making airbags safer with time.

A boon despite flaws

The airbag is still not perfect, and unlike a seat belt you can’t find out how good it is till you have an accident. And even if engineers develop the perfect airbag, the possibility of manufacturing defects can’t be wished away.

The Takata airbag recall that started in 2016 affects 67 million airbags in 42 million vehicles and is still not complete. These airbags sometimes malfunction in hot and humid conditions, especially when they are old. They contain an ammonium-nitrate-based propellant that can ignite spontaneously, sending metal shards from the airbag flying around the cabin.

At last count, faulty Takata airbags had killed at least 27 people worldwide since 2002, according to Consumer Reports. But on the other hand, airbags have saved at least 50,000 lives since 1987 in the US alone. So, on balance, the airbag is a device that you would rather have in your car.

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Here's proof Hyderabad was called Bhagnagar centuries ago

There might not be conclusive evidence to say Hyderabad was first called Bhagyanagar, but there is enough evidence to show Bhagnagar was its common name from almost the beginning

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In the 1660s, a French traveller named Jean de Thevenot visited the kingdom of Golconda and wrote: “The capital city of this kingdom is called Bhagnagar; the Persians call it Hyderabad; it is 14 or 15 leagues from Bijapur.”

About 20 years before him, a more famous French traveller, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, had passed through the kingdom and noted:

“Bhagnagar is the name of the capital town of this kingdom, but it is commonly called Golconda, from the name of the fortress which is only 2 coss distant from it.... Bhagnagar...was commenced by the great-grandfather of the king who reigns at present, at the request of one of his wives whom he loved passionately…”

Is it possible that Hyderabad was never called Bhagnagar or Bhagyanagar, and yet 350 or 370 years ago travellers to the city heard this name, and were convinced it was the proper name they ought to record in their chronicles?

Quibbles Against It

Opponents of the Bhagyanagar theory say these travellers probably meant ‘Baghnagar’ not ‘Bhagnagar’ as Hyderabad was a city of gardens (bagh), but how could all of them have mixed up the sounds ‘bh’ and ‘gh’?

It occurs again in the memoir of the Abbé Carré, who visited Hyderabad six or seven years after Thevenot: “I also visited the large town of Bhagnagar, where I went about more freely, as it is a very spacious town, situated in flat country, watered by a fine river…”

Even if we grant that all the Frenchmen spelt ‘Baghnagar’ wrong, how could Aqil Khan Razi, a contemporary of Aurangzeb and a scholar or Persian, have mixed up the sounds in his Waqiat-i-Alamgiri, an account of the wars between Aurangzeb and his brothers? Razi wrote: “It was not till the prince had reached Bhagnagar that Qutub-l-Mulk learnt of the real state of affairs.”

And A Weak Assault

It is clear that through the 17th century, at least, Bhagnagar was a widely used name for Hyderabad. And stronger ‘evidence’ might be found in the writing of the man who denied the Bhagnagar idea most stoutly.

In his book ‘Muhammad-Quli Qutb Shah, founder of Haidarabad', Professor Haroon Khan Sherwani says that Faizi, the Mughal court’s agent in the Deccan during 1591-94 (late in Akbar’s reign), sent this dispatch: “Ahmad Quli is steeped in Sh’ism, and has built a city, Bhagnagar by name, after Bhagmati, the old prostitute who has been his mistress for a long time.”

To dismiss the Bhagmati-Bhagnagar legend as fiction, we must now presume that Faizi misled the Mughal court. He deliberately gave a false name to the city and also spun the yarn of Baghmati. And he did this right after the city’s founding when the right name and legend would have reached Agra from other sources also.

Was Faizi bent on career suicide, or worse? Sherwani thinks he was prejudiced against the Shia sultans of Golconda. He says the Bhagmati-Bhagnagar legend is false because these name do not occur in the semi-official history of the Golconda sultans compiled under Quli Qutub Shah’s successor.

But all such histories tell sanitised stories. It would have obviously left out embarrassing details of the previous king’s drinking and philandering.

Sherwani also says coins struck at Hyderabad in 1603 bear the name Hyderabad, not Bhagnagar. No coin minted at Bhagnagar has been found. But again, it is well known that Muhammad-Quli Qutb Shah renamed the city seven years after its founding. That would be in 1596 or 1598, depending on whether you take 1589 or 1591 as the founding year.

City of Fortune

In his 1927 book ‘Landmarks of the Deccan’, Syed Ali Asgar Bilgrami gives another reason to believe that Hyderabad was first called Bhagnagar. “Seven years after the completion of the city, ‘Farkhunda Bunyad’ became its chronogrammatic epithet,” he writes. This Persian name means “city of fortune”, which is a literal translation of Bhagnagar/Bhagyanagar.

While these excerpts support the belief that Hyderabad was once called Bhagnagar or Bhagyanagar, they do not in any way prove the existence of Bhagmati. However, the January 1943 issue of the journal ‘Islamic Culture’ “published under the authority of H.E.H. The Nizam’s Government” says:

“It is a pity that no local evidence comes to explain with any useful information the life of Bhagmati. The complete poetical works of Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, which have recently been published under the patronage of Nawab Salar Jang Bahadur, do not bear any reference to her name except to that of a mistress of the name of Haidar Mahal. No doubt, there is a mention of Shahr-i-Haidar which literally can be interpreted as Hyderabad and it was perhaps named after that mistress who had been styled as Haidar Mahal in his poetry.”

So the story about Bhagmati being conferred the title Haidar Mahal might have a grain of truth. It just might.

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Is sodium about to dethrone lithium in the battery universe?

A battery multiverse is more likely. Lithium will rule applications where price is not a barrier, and sodium those where battery weight does not matter

Whether it’s an ordinary power plug or the charger of your phone, they bear the letter ‘V’ for volt – the electricity unit named after the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta. Volta made the first electric battery in the year 1800. He probably didn’t imagine a future when the world would be powered by batteries, but here we are two centuries later.

With the Earth getting hotter, time is running out for coal and other fossil fuels. We will be using more and more renewables like the Sun and the wind to power our homes, offices, factories and vehicles. But these sources of energy are not consistent. There are cloudy days and still nights. So, renewables work best with some kind of energy storage. Usually a battery that stores surplus energy when it is available, and supplies it when the Sun isn’t shining, or the wind isn’t blowing.

Sodium’s Moment

One interesting thing about Volta’s battery was that it used either ordinary salt water or caustic soda as an electrolyte between plates of different metals. Both salt and ‘caustic’ are compounds of the metal called sodium. Lithium, the wunderkind of modern batteries, wasn’t discovered until 17 years later.

After debuting on the battery stage, sodium left the scene like a one-song wonder. But it seems to be on a comeback tour now. Last year ended with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries picking up a $135-million stake in the British firm Faradion that has a head start in the field of sodium-ion batteries.

Other firms like California-based Natron (the name’s derived from sodium’s Latin name natrium) and China’s CATL have also rapidly improved their sodium-ion technologies. And there are many others.

So, why this sudden interest in sodium batteries? Are they better than lithium batteries? Will they allow cars to go 1000km on a single charge? Will they give your phone a week’s battery life?

Poor Man’s Lithium

Not really. Sodium and lithium are cousins on the periodic table. They live in the leftmost block. Lithium is one floor above sodium, and they behave alike in many ways, but lithium always tops the battery class. So sodium is the poor man’s lithium, and that’s what has made it so attractive now.

The problem with lithium is that its demand and price have hit the stratosphere. Lithium is a relatively scarce metal but everything from shavers to laptops and electric cars uses a lithium battery these days. So, the price of lithium hydroxide, which is a key raw material for making lithium-ion batteries, has shot up from about $4,500 in 2012 to almost $80,000. That’s why Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who needs tonnes of lithium to make Tesla cars and giant storage batteries, tweeted in April: “Price of lithium has gone to insane levels!”

But sodium hydroxide was at just $800 per tonne at the time. That’s to be expected because there’s hundreds of times more sodium than lithium in Earth’s crust, and it’s everywhere. With its vast coastline, India has an inexhaustible supply.

Not The First Choice

It’s abundant but sodium has some downsides as a battery material. Ounce for ounce, sodium batteries store less charge than lithium batteries. So you need a heavier battery for the same capacity. That’s why when the uses for rechargeable batteries were limited – camcorders and feature phones – scientists focused on developing lithium battery technology. In fact the 2019 Nobel in chemistry went to scientists who had worked in this field.

Sony launched the first gadget with a rechargeable lithium battery – a handheld video camera – in 1991. Since then, lithium batteries have improved a lot. The latest ones can be charged and discharged thousands of times. Current sodium batteries have a lot of catching up to do in this respect.

There’s also the question of scale. Although lithium is expensive, the scale at which lithium batteries are made keeps them affordable. Sodium batteries are expected to be 40% cheaper eventually, but that won’t happen until manufacturing scales up.

Made For Heavy Lifting

But sodium ion batteries have many advantages besides the promise of lower prices. Sodium itself is easy to extract and its batteries do not require cobalt – a metal mined at great human cost in central Africa.

While sodium batteries don’t store as much energy as the latest lithium batteries, by weight, they are far better than lead acid batteries used to start cars, and have reached the level where lithium batteries were a few years ago.

Faradion claims its batteries store about 160 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, which is similar to lithium batteries based on the older ‘lithium iron phosphate’ (LFP) technology. And with money pouring in for research, sodium batteries will keep getting better, even if they never catch up with lithium batteries.

Unlike lithium batteries, sodium batteries can be discharged completely for transportation, which eliminates the risk of fire in transit. They lose very little charge in cold conditions, and best of all, as they are very similar to lithium batteries, they can be made in the same factories without major retooling.

So, coming back to the question – is sodium about to dethrone lithium in the battery universe? The answer is they both might be kings in a battery multiverse. Lithium will remain the first choice for powerful cars, laptops and phones, while sodium will be a better fit for applications where high battery weight or low energy density do not matter. Giant storage batteries that power the grid, home inverters, and short-range vehicles like e-rickshaws and city cabs could all be run on it.

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Why John Hinckley Jr shot President Ronald Reagan

John Hinckley Jr listening to Jodie Foster's testimony

When Taxi Driver released in 1976, John Hinckley Jr – the man who shot and wounded US President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981 – was a student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. He was lonely, friendless and miserable. FBI’s description of him after his arrest has a very brief record of his friends: “none”.

John was a misfit in the classroom too. He wanted to be a singer and writer but was stuck in a business course. Every time he thought he would flunk a course, he withdrew from it (after failing to get a degree in six years, he finally dropped out in 1979).

Needless to say, John wasn’t making much progress at Texas Tech. He shifted to Los Angeles for a while, and while there saw Taxi Driver. He watched it again, and again, and again, altogether 16 times. By the time he came home to Evergreen, Colorado, for the holidays that year he was John Hinckley Jr in name only. Inside, he had transformed into Travis Bickle, the character played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. He was also madly, obsessively in love with Iris, the child prostitute played by Jodie Foster.

Correction: John was madly, obsessively in love with Jodie Foster. And his fixation started a string of capers that nearly resulted in the death of a US president.

Divorced from reality

In their 1985 book ‘Breaking Points’, John’s parents Jack and JoAnne Hinckley have described in detail how he lost touch with reality.

They were surprised and delighted when he called to tell them he finally had a girlfriend, Lynn Collins, who wanted to be an actress. John was so shy he would flee to his room everytime neighbours visited. He wouldn’t even play his guitar for his parents. And yet, he told them he had charmed Lynn at a laundromat.

It was too good to be true, as the FBI found out in its investigation. Lynn was a creation of John’s mind. She was his equivalent of Travis’s rich girlfriend in Taxi Driver. She was, perhaps, the first of many tales he wove over the next 5 years.

That 1976 winter when John came home, he asked his mother if she had seen Taxi Driver. She hadn’t, so she couldn’t guess his new wardrobe was inspired by Travis. More than style, John was hooked on Travis’s ideas. One of them was to ‘rescue’ Jodie from a ‘degenerate’ society, and the other to try and assassinate a president.

Jodie was the bigger obsession. In the Washington hotel room where John had stayed the day of the attempted assassination, FBI found a picture of President and Mrs Reagan. On it, John had written Jodie and he would occupy the White House one day. They also found a picture of Napoleon, under which he had written, “Napoleon and Josephine. John and Jodie.”

Peach Brandy

On New Year’s Eve in 1980, John had sat alone in his room at his parents’ house and recorded this message on his cassette recorder: “Anything that I might do in 1981 would be solely for Jodie Foster’s sake. I want to tell the world in some way that I worship and idolise her.”

He recorded it after refusing his father’s offer of champagne and asking for peach brandy instead. Yes, peach brandy – the drink that Travis soaked his bread in for breakfast.

But months before this declaration he had started making secret trips to New Haven in Connecticut where an 18-year-old Jodie had enrolled at Yale University in autumn of 1980. He called her at her dorm and recorded two of their conversations. Unknown to her, he stalked her on the campus, and is believed to have followed her around with a pistol with the idea that her murder followed by his suicide would link them in death.

His other plan was to kidnap Jodie, then hijack a plane and demand that the two of them “be installed in the White House”. He even wrote a note to the FBI threatening to kidnap her.

John was also slipping notes and letters under Jodie’s dormitory door. The first set came in September. The second in October or November (Jodie wasn’t sure), and the last on March 6, 1981. A note in it read: “Jodie Foster, love, just wait. I will rescue you very soon. Please cooperate.”

When she appeared to testify at John’s trial, Jodie said she had immediately recognised it as the type of letter Travis had sent to Iris in Taxi Driver.

John Travis

By March 1981, John had morphed into Travis completely. When his parents refused to let him stay at home – hoping he would take charge of his life – he signed the register at a motel as “J. Travis”. John Travis.

The day he shot Reagan, John was supposed to be in Hollywood, talking to his music industry contacts. His mother had put him on a plane to California herself. So, how did he land up in Washington DC?

It was his Jodie obsession again. He had boarded a coast-to-coast Greyhound bus from Hollywood to New Haven. After travelling for 4 days, he had arrived in Washington DC, and stopped for the night. By chance he read Reagan’s itinerary in a newspaper and decided to kill him, to impress Jodie.

Yes, there was no political angle or animosity. John had in fact been pleased when Reagen won the presidential race a few months earlier. “Maybe there’s hope for this country yet,” he had told his father.

It didn’t matter to him which president he shot as long as he could be famous. In October 1980 he had been arrested with 3 guns at Nashville airport on a day when then President Jimmy Carter was present in the city. Nobody suspected what he was up to, so he was released with a paltry $62.5 fine.

Reagan unfortunately became a casualty of John’s Jodie fixation. FBI found a letter John had left behind for Jodie in his Washington hotel room in the afternoon of March 30, 1981:

“Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you, whether it be in total obscurity or whatever. I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you.”

Although John shot and injured the president and 3 others in plain sight from 15 feet away (6 shots in 1.7 seconds, according to the FBI), the jury held him not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He was sent to a psychiatric institution but it took them a while to recalibrate his sense of reality. In that time he managed to send a 4-page letter to The New York Times that, among other things, said:

“The shooting outside the Washington Hilton Hotel was the greatest love offering in the world…. At one time Miss Foster was a star and I was the insignificant fan. Now everything is changed. I am Napoleon and she is Josephine. I am Romeo and she is Juliet…. I may be in prison and she may be making a movie in Paris or Hollywood but Jodie and I will always be together, in life and in death.”

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When a plane flew away on its own from Delhi's Safdarjung airport

Piper Super Cruiser reference image

Remember Unstoppable, the 2010 Denzel Washington movie? A runaway train hurtling full speed ahead towards a town, laden with a toxic cargo. Now, imagine a plane flying without a pilot. Nobody inside the cockpit at all. Impossible, you say? But such incidents happen. Not with the cumbersome airliners that come to mind first, but with small and simple aircraft.

It happened in New Delhi once. On January 16, 1961, a Piper Super Cruiser belonging to Lucknow Flying Club took off “automatically”, rather, “autonomously”, from Safdarjung Aerodrome with nobody on board. The pint-sized single-engine craft, weighing just 430kg — a Maruti 800 weighs 650kg — zoomed down the runway and was airborne before the bewildered pilot could jump inside the cockpit. Minutes later, the plane crashed to the ground, “substantially damaged”.

The case summary published in the annual report of Accidents Investigation Branch of the Civil Aviation Department, Ministry of Transport and Communications, read: “The accident is attributed to an error of the pilot in not exercising adequate precautions while starting the engine by swinging the propeller without a competent person at the controls.”

The matter came up for discussion in Parliament on February 28, 1961 under the heading: “Automatic taking off of aircraft from Safdarjung Airport”.

Members expressed surprise. Jaswant Singh from Rajasthan asked, “Whether automatically the engines got started, or whether the engines were already running and the plane took off?”

Dr P Subbarayan, then minister of transport and communications, replied: “Even in the case of a motorcar, when a man starts it by turning the handle, the car being in gear, it starts off even without the driver.”

Babubhai Chinai, a member from Mumbai, remarked: “But we have never heard about the aircraft and therefore I was enquiring about it.”

Subbarayan then explained that, unable to fire up the engine with the self-starter, the pilot had got off the plane to start it by turning the propeller. Unfortunately, he had not placed chocks in front of the wheels, nor left anyone at the controls. The engine spun to life, and the plane sped off with the pilot scrambling behind it.

Most small vintage planes are capable of such mischief, but the Aeronca Champion has a reputation for it. In 1997, a Champ landed in Ohio, USA, with mechanical problems. The pilot got off and started the engine by hand-cranking the propeller, but before he could jump in again, the plane took off and flew for about 160km — about an hour — before the fuel ran out and it crashed.

Aeronca Champion reference image

In another case, in 2001, a Champ took off while its owner was checking the running engine. It crashed after flying for about 56km.

And at an air show in 2009, a biplane with enough fuel to fly 240km took off on its own, only to crash into nearby trees.

A brief history of monkeypox

In the 1950s the world was getting serious about fighting polio. Labs in Europe and North America were busy making and testing vaccines. But they needed an army of lab monkeys to do their job. So, thousands of monkeys were shipped from Asia to these labs.

In 1958, a lab in Denmark noticed a strange smallpox-like disease in monkeys that had arrived from Malaysia. Tests were done at the State Serum Institute in Copenhagen, and scientists realised they had discovered a brand-new virus.

Because the virus and the disease occurred in monkeys, they named it monkeypox.

Tracing link to Africa

Between 1958 and 1968, several outbreaks of monkeypox occurred in lab monkeys, and because all the monkeys had come from Asia, scientists at first thought the virus reservoir was in Asia.

To test this theory, they took blood samples from more than a thousand monkeys in India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan, but found that none of the animals had monkeypox antibodies. This was odd because a viral infection produces antibodies that can be found in an animal’s blood even years later.

The mystery of the monkeypox virus’s natural reservoir was solved in the 1970s after the first case of monkeypox in a human was confirmed in Zaire – now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo – in central Africa.

This time scientists collected blood samples from animals in central and western Africa, and sure enough 7 species of monkeys and 2 species of squirrels had monkeypox antibodies.

While the mystery of monkeypox’s origin had been solved, one question remained – how had Asian monkeys become infected with it?

The answer was that, along with the Asian monkeys, the European and American labs had also imported some monkeys from west Africa, scientists Frank Fenner, Riccardo Wittek and Keith Dumbell wrote in their 1989 book, ‘The Orthopoxviruses’.

The Asian and African monkeys had either come in contact with each other or the virus had been transferred through their human handlers. After strict handling rules were enforced in 1968, monkeypox outbreaks in labs stopped.

But the discovery of human monkeypox set alarm bells ringing for other reasons.

Threat to smallpox fight

A global campaign to wipe out smallpox had started in 1967. It was so successful that by 1972, Americans didn’t need smallpox vaccinations. And on the 8th of May, 1980, the World Health Organization declared the whole world was smallpox-free. It’s the only disease we have been able to eradicate so far.

However, in 1970 scientists feared that if the monkeypox virus – which was similar to smallpox and produced almost identical symptoms – infected humans, it would jeopardise the ‘Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program’.

WHO asked the labs affected by monkeypox in America and Europe if they had recorded cases of animal-to-human transmission, but none of them had. And yet, a 9-month-old village boy who was admitted to the Basankusu Hospital in Zaire on the 1st of September, 1970 had tested positive for monkeypox.

His village had been vaccinated for smallpox, and nobody else in the area had reported fever with a rash, so smallpox was ruled out. But the boy himself was not vaccinated. He was the only unvaccinated member of his family. He got fever on the 22nd of August and developed a rash on the 24th.

While he was at the Basankusu Hospital, his pox scabs were collected and sent to Moscow, where tests showed he had monkeypox. He made a slow recovery over the next two months, but just when doctors were thinking of discharging him, he caught measles in the hospital on the 23rd of October and died 6 days later.

A poor spreader

Now that it was clear that monkeypox could infect humans, scientists became more vigilant. In 1971, suspected cases of smallpox in Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast turned out to be monkeypox infections.

But the good news was that monkeypox didn’t affect humans outside its natural reservoir in central and western Africa. Of the 404 cases reported between 1970 and 1986, about 90% occurred in small villages inside tropical rain forests where people led a hunter-gatherer life and had frequent contact with wild animals.

In one case a chimpanzee abducted a 6-month-old child from a Zaire village. People chased and rescued the child but a week later it came down with fever and a rash that turned out to be monkeypox. Zaire had the maximum cases of monkeypox – 386 out of the 404

Data also showed that monkeypox was not very contagious among humans. With smallpox, 58% of the contacts of a patient used to get infected, but with monkeypox this percentage was just 9% among people who had not taken the smallpox vaccine

In case you are wondering, the smallpox vaccine does provide a high degree of protection against monkeypox because the two viruses are so similar. And in the 1980s data from Africa showed that most of the severe monkeypox infections and deaths occurred in unvaccinated children.

Another interesting and reassuring finding was that monkeypox outbreaks naturally died out after a maximum of 11 steps of human-to-human transmission. That explains why even after lurking in the rain forests of Africa for centuries monkeypox could not become a common human disease even when the smallpox vaccine wasn’t around

But if monkeypox was always a disease of central and western Africa, how has it spread in Europe now?

Clues from America

We don’t know for sure, but the 2003 monkeypox outbreak in America might provide clues. That year, 82 infections were recorded in the US during May and June. New York Times journalist Denise Grady has described the chain of events in her book ‘Deadly Invaders’.

She says the first US cases appeared in the state of Wisconsin. A family got infected from its pet prairie dog, which is not really a dog but a squirrel. The family recovered but the sick pet didn’t.

In another case, an 11-year-old boy got monkeypox after his friend’s prairie dogs bit him. Later, it was found that every single US case had started from contact with a prairie dog. One particular animal managed to infect 18 people. A 10-year-old girl who owned 3 prairie dogs in Illinois became so sick she had to be given morphine to suppress her pain. She had sores inside her throat, Grady writes.

So how did prairie dogs, which are an American species, become carriers of monkeypox? Grady says owning prairie dogs was a fad in 2003, with people paying up to 150 dollars for one.

A Chicago pet store called Phil’s Pocket Pets sold them in large numbers, but it also had a giant Gambian pouched rat imported from Ghana in west Africa. The prairie dogs probably got infected from the African rat.

And Phil’s was just one shop. Altogether 800 animals had been sent from Ghana in one shipment in April 2003. All the imported animals had to be traced and put down. Prairie dogs exposed to the imported animals also had to be killed.

Had the disease spread among America’s wild animals it would have become impossible to eradicate. Luckily, the outbreak ended without any human death, but the US banned the import of African rodents after it, and also the sale of prairie dogs as pets.

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Clive Branson: British soldier who wanted freedom for India

Sent to India just before the Quit India Movement, Branson was not at all like India’s British rulers. His letters reveal a man deeply in love with the country

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It’s February 1943. The Japanese are advancing on India from the east and the country is in the middle of the Quit India Movement. Not the best time to be a white sahib in India, but an English soldier camping in Karwar, Karnataka, is winning hearts.

He’s a poet and painter, and visits the local school one day to talk to the children about Wordsworth’s poetry. One of the boys asks him, “Britain has ruled India for 150 years – if India conquered Britain, how long would it rule?”

Instead of being annoyed, the soldier is impressed. “The brightness and intelligence of these children is splendid,” he writes in a letter to his wife Noreen.

It’s not the first time he has expressed his admiration for Indians to her. While based in Gulunche near Pune, he sees women making a road, and writes: “What dignity the women labourers here in India give to the very primitive making of a country lane.”

Who is this man, so out of character with Indian’s British masters? His name is Clive Branson. Born to a British army officer in Ahmednagar in 1907, he has returned to the country after 35 years.

While in India, Branson writes many letters to Noreen. They are published as a book, ‘British Soldier in India’, after his death in 1944, and it’s through them we know his views about India.

Sensitive to suffering

Almost the first thing Branson does on arrival in Bombay, in May 1942, is search for a book on Hindi. Then, on the road to Gulunche near Pune, he sees how poor most Indians are and writes: “After 175 years of imperialism in India, the conditions are a howling disgrace.”

Later, while based in Dhond, he expresses the same feelings in stronger words: “However much people at home believe in British imperialism, there are 400 million (Indians) who know by bitter daily experience the reality.”

As ‘rations corporal’ of the Gulunche camp, he goes to town daily to buy provisions, and uses the outings as an opportunity to make friends with the locals and learn Marathi. But in the camp, he has to tolerate the older soldiers who are hostile to Indians. Branson calls them “bloody idiots” and writes he is ashamed to think of himself as one of them.

When riots break out after the arrest of Congress leaders at the start of the Quit India Movement, the troops at Gulunche are sent out on law and order duty, but Branson avoids it because he regards it as “warfare against the people”.

His sympathies are with the Indian rioters: “Even though one does not agree with what the people are doing, one understands why they do it.”

He is a communist who has fought in the Spanish Civil War and spent time in a concentration camp. A keen observer of politics, he mocks the British Labour Party for urging the Congress leaders to call off the movement.

“How brilliant! doesn’t the Labour Party know that the Congress leaders are in jail, and that is why the rioting is going on – anarchistic because without leadership?”

Likewise, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill implies in a speech that the riots in India are a Congress conspiracy to help the Japanese, Branson writes: “Churchill’s speech on India was just filth.”

When a soldier at the camp tells him he is lowering ‘white prestige’ by being friendly with the Indian tea and fruit sellers, Branson retorts: “The fact that white sahibs go into cheap brothels with native women must do much to uphold this prestige.”

He can’t stand the condescending manner Englishmen assume towards Indians. He tells Noreen: “When this war is over, we must come back to India as civilised friends.” In another letter he says: “I know I shall want to come back to India, where I can feel I am with humanity and not just one of a stuck-up little part of it.”

One night, he loses his cool when white officers hit and shout at a young Indian. “I am certain I shall not end my tour of duty in the army in India without getting into some trouble through sticking up for the Indians. But I know who is right,” he writes.

Part of a painting by Clive's daughter, Rosa Branson. She made it as a tribute to him in 2009. It shows him against the backdrop of the British war cemetery in Myanmar (Burma)

Politically conscious

Branson’s letters also record interesting political events in India. For example, his letter of September 26, 1942 mentions a campaign in Gujarat’s Kaira district (home to Amul) to collect 1 lakh signatures from 700 villages to demand the release of Congress leaders from jail.

When the British propaganda machinery tries to tar the image of student protesters with a rumour that some of them have raped a woman, Branson writes, “fancy Congress students demonstrating for the release of Nehru by raping women”.

The poverty of the countryside pains him. “A journey through this country is indeed painful – there is such a vast mass of human happiness, human intelligence, gone to waste.”

So when an officer asks him to paint scenes from army life, he writes: “If I paint at all, I want to paint the Indians...my conception of life is my conception of painting. I don’t paint things I want to forget.”

At the end of 1942, when Bombay is gripped by food shortage and workers are spending up to eight hours a day in food queues, Branson feels depressed at his inability to do anything to meet the “huge situation… so little able to atone for the stinking, filthy, crooked, hypocritical bastards of so-called Englishmen who rule this great country.”

The seaside break in Karwar in 1943 is a pleasant interlude on his tour. “I shall never forget these fishermen, these peasants, these children and their little town,” he tells Noreen. But he doesn’t know he has only a year left to live. On February 25, 1944 he is killed while fighting the Japanese in Burma.

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