History of pandemics

Epidemics and pandemics have been occurring for centuries in recorded history. In 430 B.C. Athens was the center of Western civilization. That year one out of three Athenians died from a then mysterious disease, possibly measles, typhoid, scarlet fever or smallpox. Most historians credit this event as the immediate cause of the end of the golden age of Greece.

As the Roman Empire expanded, its soldiers, explorers and merchants brought back numerous germs and brought them again to other lands. In the second millennium A.D. , an epidemic broke out causing almost seven million deaths and hastened the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The infamous Black Death was actually several waves of bubonic plague over a hundred year period in the Middle Ages. The plagues are believed to have reduced the overall population of Europe by one half while its effects have never really been recorded.

There is a myth that the Spanish conquistador Cortez landed on the coast of Mexico with 600 Spaniards and conquered the Aztec Empire with a population of many millions. According to Jared Diamond in his book  Gunas, Germs and Steel, what gave the Spaniards a decisive advantage was smallpox which reached Mexico in 1529 with one infected slave arriving from Cuba, then a Spanish colony. The resulting epidemic proceeded to kill nearly half of the Aztecs who became terrorized by the mysterious illness that killed Indians and spared Spaniards, as if strengthening the image of Spanish invincibility.

In the last century, an influenza pandemic called the Spanish flu resulted in 40 to 50 million deaths worldwide. It was also claimed that it infected 500 milllion people globally which was around a quarter of the world’s population.

Despite its name, historical and epidemiological data cannot identify the geographic origin of the Spanish flu. This period was the end of the First World War. Wartime censorship had prevented the reporting of the disease in most countries. Spain remained neutral during the war. When the pandemic spread from France to Spain in 1918, newspapers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in Spain which created the impression that Spain was the center of the pandemic.

Origins of contagious diseases. Most experts agree on original causes for the spread of infectious diseases. According to Diamond crowd diseases could have arisen only with the build up of large, dense human populations. That build up began with the rise of agriculture starting about 10,000 years ago and then accelerated with the rise of cities starting several thousand years.

The first attested dates for many familiar infectious diseases are recent – considering again that agriculture began 10,000 years ago. Those landmark dates are around 1600 B.C. for smallpox as deduced from pockmarks on an Egyptian mummy; 400 B.C. for mumps; 200 B.C. for leprosy; 1840 A.D.for epidemic polio and 1959 A.D. for AIDS.

Agriculture sustains a much higher human population density than the hunting-gathering lifestyle. Hunters-gatherers also frequently shift camp and leave behind their own pile of feces with accumulated microbes and worm larvae. But farmers are sedentary and live among their own sewage thus providing microbes with a short path from one person’s body to another’s drinking water.

Cities bring many people into close contact making it easier for disease carrying microbes to circulate especially among poor people crowded together in unsanitary conditions. Arno Karlen in his book Man and Microbes : Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times said, “...as farmers and villagers began crowding into cities, this immunologically virgin mass offered a feast to germs lurking in domesticated animals, waste, filth and scavengers.”

SARS began with a virus that originated from animals. According to Karlen, human beings contracted 65 diseases from dogs, 45 diseases from cattle and 35 diseases from horses. Both Karlen and Diamond, in their books, wrote that measles came either from dogs or cattle, tuberculosis from cattle, influenza and flu from pigs and ducks, common cold from horses, malaria from mosquitoes, scarlet fever and typhus bubonic plague from fleas, and AIDS from chimpanzees. There is speculation that the origin of COVID-19 came from the wildlife market of Wuhan. It is, however, evident that contagious diseases are partly the result of germs evolving from the intimacy  of human beings with animals. Another cause is that it is the result of certain animals being a part of the diet of human beings.

History, globalization and pandemics

Pandemics have altered the course of world history. The deaths of an estimated 90 million inhabitants in the New World practically wiped out the native population in the Americas. This led to the Europeanization of North and South America unlike Asia where the native populations and their civilizations continued to flourish.

Today, because of globalization and technology, people, goods and germs are transported more easily, more rapidly and frequently than ever before. In the past centuries, it took decades before a contagious disease could become a pandemic. In the last century it took only a few years. Today, there is real fear that the whole process could happen in a matter of months. Modern media has made the world a single village so that a single event in Hong Kong or California could seem to us in the Philippines as a neighborhood event. Pandemics also bring about changes in human behavior. The worldwide campaign for safe sex is the offshoot of the AIDS pandemic.

Ideally, this coronavirus pandemic should be tackled by a coordinated, international effort. Unfortunately the two potential global leaders – China and the United States are not trusted by most of the world.

We can only hope that the cure for COVID-19 will come soon. In the meantime we can only pray that the inner strength of the Filipino will survive this test.

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