Pandemics and Epidemics

 

 Until this past year, the terms “face masks”, “pandemics”, “epidemics”, and “quarantine” did not hold much meaning for most of us, because we had very limited experience with them.  Now, those terms are easily a part of our everyday vocabularies. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced that the COVID-19 virus was officially a pandemic after going through 114 countries in three months and infecting over 118,000 people. Without a vaccine available, the virus that began in China quickly spread to almost every country in the world. By December 2020, it had infected more than 75 million people and led to more than 1.6 million deaths worldwide. 

The ongoing prevalence of the Covid-19 pandemic has caused us to seek more information on pandemics in general and try to understand what causes them and the history of major pandemics.  As far as infectious diseases are concerned, a pandemic is the worst case scenario. When an epidemic spreads beyond a country’s borders, the disease officially becomes a pandemic.  The mobility of today’s world population can quickly and easily change an epidemic to a pandemic. 

The earliest known major pandemic happened in Athens in 430 B.C. during the Peloponnesian War and took the lives of two thirds of the population.  There have been three major bubonic plagues.  In what is believed to be the first bubonic plague, the Justinian Plague in 541 A.D. over two centuries killed 50 million people which was 26 percent of the world’s population. It was started by rats and carried by fleas.  The Black Death in 1350, the second large outbreak of the bubonic plague, was responsible for the death of one third of the world population.  It started in Asia and moved west in caravans.  In 1855 the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, claiming 15 million lives, started in China and then moved to India and Hong Kong.  This pandemic was considered active until 1960 when cases finally dropped below 200. 

Affecting many in the United States, the 1918 Spanish flu caused 50 million deaths worldwide. Within a few months of its onset in the United States, hundreds of thousands died. At that time, there were no effective drugs or vaccines to treat this flu strain. In 1919, the flu threat disappeared when most of those infected either developed immunities or died. 

We currently have a display of many books on plagues, epidemics, pandemics, and Covid-19 at the Al Harris Library.  To gain a better understanding of these topics, come by and check out a book!