Pandemia

A pandemic is an epidemic which reaches global proportions. When we think about Earth-wide infections there are only a few that come readily to mind. Today we will discuss some of the more egregious of these.

The most famous (though not the largest) of these is the “Black Death” of the European middle ages. The bubonic plague is a disease that was introduced to various populations when rats infested with fleas which carries the bacterium spread through the cities. The fleas that carried the bacterium would bite an unsuspecting victim and transmit the infection to the host. The disease is thought to have originated in central Asia and spread via the trade routes as industrious rats, always searching for food, followed the grain to various locales. There have been various outbreaks of this disease starting from the Plague of Justinian in about 541 AD and ending with the London Plague in 1656-57.

Cholera has lead to many deaths over the years, even though is has been largely eradicated in more modern times. There have been seven major, world-wide outbreaks since 1816. Most of there started (or were rumored to start) on either the Indian subcontinent or in Russia. These populations seemed to be specifically desirous to this strain of bacteria. Always the pandemic will begin in regions (or at least be at its worst) where the population is overcrowded and a lack of hygiene is evident.

In 1918, probably the virulent, and one of the least well known, pandemics seems to have begun on a military base in Kansas. This flu, which swept the world in a period of 18 months, killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people. No other epidemic has killed so many in so short a time. The flu had people wearing surgical masks everywhere and avoiding contact with anyone. It is believed that on the WWI battlefields this influenza killed many more soldiers than actual wounds received in battle. There have been other outbreaks of the flu that have been considered pandemic. The four main ones, Asiatic (1889-1890), Spanish (1918-19), Asian (1957-58), and the Hong Kong (1968-69) flu’s have killed an estimated 200 million people throughout the world.

Other pandemics have occurred with typhus, HIV, and smallpox. The agent is not always the same, but the results are. We have increased our resistance to these killers due to research and vaccination, but there is always the possibility of another killer on the horizon.