Home > Pandemic
A pandemic or global epidemic is a disease that affects people or animals over an extensive geographical area (from Greek pan all + demos people). Technically speaking it should cover the whole globe and affect everyone. 1 Common killers and pandemics
Note that just because a disease kills a lot of people it is not necessarily a pandemic. Many diseases, for example cancer, kill large numbers of people, but they are in fact a number of diseases lumped together for the sake of convenience.
2 Pandemics through history
There have been a number of significant pandemics in human history, all of them generally zoonoses that came about with domestication of animals - such as smallpox, diphtheria, influenza and tuberculosis. There have been a number of particularly significant epidemics that deserve mention above the 'mere' destruction of cities:
- Peloponnesian War, 430 BCE. An unknown agent killed a quarter of the Athenian troops and a quarter of the population over four years. This disease fatally weakened the dominance of Athens, but the sheer virulence of the disease prevented its wider spread; i.e. it killed off its hosts at a rate faster than they could spread it.
- Antonine Plague, 165Events A pandemic breaks out in Rome after the Roman army returns from Parthia. Legio II Italica is created by Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Births Macrinus, Roman emperor (approximate date) Deaths Justin Martyr, early apologist for Christianity Claudius- 180Alternate uses, see Number 180''. Events Commodus succeeds his father Marcus Aurelius as Roman Emperor. In his Methodus Medendo Greek physician Galen describes the connection between paralysis and severance of the spinal cord. Births Deaths March 17 Marcu. Possibly smallpox brought back from the Near East; killed a quarter of those infected and up to five million in all. At the height of a second outbreak (251-266) 5,000 people a day were said to be dying in RomeRome ( Italian and Latin Roma is the capital city of Italy, and of its Lazio region. It is located on the lower Tiber river, near the Mediterranean Sea, at 41°50'N, 12°15'E. The Vatican City State, a sovereign enclave within Rome, is the seat of the Roman.
- Plague of JustinianThe Plague of Justinian is the first known pandemic on record, and it also marks the first recorded case of bubonic plague. The plague occurred in around AD 550; it started in Africa and moved northward until it reached Constantinople (formerly known as B, started 541Events January 1 Flavius Basilius Junior appointed as consul in Constantinople, the last person to hold this office January 2 Earthquake strikes Laodicea. Plague appears in Egypt, spreading the following year to Constantinople. Totila becomes king of the. The first recorded outbreak of the bubonic plagueBubonic plague is an infectious disease that is believed to have caused several epidemics or pandemics throughout history. Bubonic plague is the most common form of plague which causes swollen, tender lymph glands (called buboes); other forms are Septicem. It started in EgyptJumhuriyat Misr al-Arabiyah ( In Detail) Official language Arabic Capital Cairo Largest City Cairo President Hosni Mubarak Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif Area Total % water Ranked 29th 1,001,450 km² 0. 6% Population Total (2003) Density Ranked 15th 74,718,797 and reached ConstantinopleConstantinople (Roman name: Constantinopolis; Greek: Konstantinoupolis or ) is the former name of the city of Istanbul in Turkey. Its original name was Byzantium ( Greek: Byzantion or Bυζαντιο&nu pronounced roughly B the following spring, killing (according to the Byzantine chronicler Procopius) 10,000 a day at its height and perhaps 40 per cent of the city's inhabitants. It went on to destroy up to a quarter of the human population of the eastern Mediterranean.
- The Black Death, started 1300s. Eight hundred years after the last outbreak, the bubonic plague returned to Europe. Starting in Asia, the disease reached Mediterranean and western Europe in 1348 (possibly from Italian merchants fleeing fighting in the Crimea), and killed twenty million Europeans in six years, a quarter of the total population and up to a half in the worst-affected urban areas.
- Cholera
- first pandemic 1816- 1826. Previously restricted to the Indian subcontinent, the pandemic began in Bengal, then spread across India by 1820. It extended as far as China and the Caspian Sea before receding.
- The second pandemic (1829-1851) reached Europe, London in 1832, New York in the same year, and the Pacific coast of North America by 1834.
- The third pandemic (1852-1860) mainly affected Russia, with over a million deaths.
- The fourth pandemic (1863-1875) spread mostly in Europe and Africa.
- The sixth pandemic (1899-1923) had little effect in Europe because of advances in public health, but Russia was badly affected again.
- The seventh pandemic began in Indonesia in 1961, called El Tor after the strain, and reached Bangladesh in 1963, India in 1964, and the USSR in 1966.
- The " Spanish Flu", 1918-1919. Began in August 1918 in three disparate locations: Brest, Boston and Freetown. An unusually severe and deadly strain of influenza spread worldwide. The disease spread across the world, killing 25 million in the course of six months; some estimates put the total of those killed worldwide at over twice that number. An estimated 17 million died in India, 500,000 in the USA and 200,000 in England. It vanished within 18 months, and the actual strain was never determined.
The epidemic disease of wartime was typhus, sometimes called "camp fever" because of its pattern of flaring up in times of strife. (It is also known as "gaol fever" and "ship fever", for its habits of spreading wildly in cramped quarters, such as jails and ships.) Emerging during the Crusades, it had its first impact in Europe in 1489 in Spain. During fighting between the Christian Spaniards and the Muslims in Granada, the Spanish lost 3,000 to war casualties and 20,000 to typhus. In 1528 the French lost 18,000 troops in Italy and lost supremacy in Italy to the Spanish. In 1542, 30,000 people died of typhus while fighting the Ottomans in the Balkans. The disease also played a major role in the destruction of Napoleon's grande armée in Russia in 1811. Typhus also killed numerous prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, including Anne Frank.
Encounters between European explorers and populations in the rest of the world often introduced local epidemics of extraordinary virulence. Disease killed the entire native (Guanches) population of the Canary Islands in the 16th century. Half the native population of Hispaniola in 1518 was killed by smallpox. Smallpox also ravaged Mexico in the 1520s, killing 150,000 in Tenochtitlán alone, including the emperor, and Peru in the 1530s, aiding the European conquerors. Measles killed a further two million Mexican natives in the 1600s. As late as 1848-49, as many as 40,000 out of 150,000 Hawaiians are estimated to have died of measles, whooping cough and influenza.
There are also a number of unknown diseases that were extremely serious but have now vanished, so the etiology of these diseases cannot be established. Examples include the previously mentioned plague in 430 BCE Greece and the English Sweat in 16th-century England, which struck people down in an instant and was more greatly feared even than the bubonic plague.
