The world’s biggest pandemics before COVID-19
With everything that’s happening in the world right now, and with the news constantly bombarding us with new statistics and daily, minute-by-minute updates about COVID-19, it’s almost hard to imagine that this is not the world’s first pandemic. With over a million people currently infected and the rate of infection rising by the day, it may feel as if it’s never going to end, and with entire countries on lockdown for weeks and months on end except for essential services, it’s also hard to believe that this is not the biggest pandemic the world has ever witnessed.
A pandemic, is a disease, or in the case of COVID-19, a virus that is “prevalent throughout an entire country, continent or the world.” An epidemic on the other hand affects a spatial area at a community, region or country level, so in essence the infection radius is much smaller. When we think of pandemics, there are a few that spring to mind – the plague certainly being one. The “Plague of Justinian” is one of the first recorded plagues in our history and occurred in 541 CE. The plague is estimated to have killed between thirty and fifty million people as it spread rapidly across Europe, Asia, Arabia and North Africa. “People had no real understanding of how to fight it other than trying to avoid sick people,” says Thomas Mockaitis, a history professor at DePaul University. “As to how the plague ended, the best guess is that the majority of people in a pandemic somehow survive, and those who survive have immunity.” The plague’s origins lay in Yersinia pestis infested fleas that piggy-backed on rats which assisted with the spread of the subsequent plagues.
Another of history’s infamous pandemics is the aptly named “Black Death”. Like most diseases and viruses, the Plague of Justinian never really went away. Viruses and diseases can lay dormant, they can mutate, and they can reappear, as was the case with the Black Death. And if you thought that the Plague of Justinian was bad, the Black Death was absolutely ruthless having claimed an unfathomable and uncomprehendingly devastating 200 million lives in just over four years. At this time, very little was known about the scientific origins of the disease as well as how to decimate it. However, the Black Death was also the advent of isolation and quarantine as a preventative method as while the science behind the contagion was unclear, what was clear was that it was passed through being in close proximity to one another.
The Great Plague of London, Smallpox, the Spanish Influenza of 1918 (H1N1 Virus which infected approximately 500 million people) and Cholera also had a major impact on the world as we know it and the medical field as a whole, and contributed enormously to the advent of vaccinations. It took more than four centuries for smallpox to be completely eradicated. Smallpox was also the first virus epidemic to be ended through the use of a vaccine. This was not before the almost total annihilation of the Native American population, with smallpox “killing 90 -95 percent of the indigenous population.”
With each new epidemic and pandemic, we have demonstrated how far we have come from a medically scientific perspective, however with the arrival of new viruses and ultimately pandemics such as COVID-19 and a rapidly growing population, our knowledge and our ability to curb the spread of them is tested again, sometimes the most effective method is to fall back on old ones and just stay at home, if you can, at least for now.