Module 5

Module 5 Previous pandemics and what humanity has learned.

1)Spend some time for this class session learning about any other historical pandemic by doing self-guided research. What other pandemics can you find that has plagued humanity? Where did it strike? Why were people vulnerable to it? How long did it last? Did the people who experienced it learn anything from the experience / do anything differently afterward? What were the long-term effects of it on human populations or on the planet?

- As many have now clearly been exposed to the media one should already be aware of the life-altering impact that the COVID 19 Pandemic has brought, therefore many may be asking "what is a pandemic?" and "What does it do?". The word pandemic originates from the Greek word Pan meaning all and demos meaning people, the -ic is English and coming together making our modern-day word Pandemic. yet what does pandemic mean? put simply a pandemic is an outbreak of diseases or disease in a global proportion. They usually occur when a new virus (a submicroscopic infectious agent) emerges and begins to infect people at an alarming rate and is able to sustain such spread. There usually is little to no existing immunity which allows it to spread so quickly.

Our ancestors had previous pandemics and clearly, some overcame them,  as humans have come together and organized themselves in closer compacted cities the probability for infectious diseases to emerge has risen. One of these great pandemics was the plague of Justinian (541-542 AD) in the Byzantine Empire. The culprit was Yersinia pestis aka the bubonic plague, it was carried by rats and transferred to humans through fleas. 25-50 million died after the plague had run its course, then returned 800 years later as the most infamous pandemic in human history. Sicily,1347 sailers brought with them very mysterious illnesses that gave people dark swellings or "buboes" in the armpit region and the groin. therefore this leads to the infamous Black Death.
The Black Death that ran from 1347-1351 forced visions to ban sailors from entering the city and lead to the first use of the word quarantine or 40 days in reference to the time that sailors spent in their ships before they were allowed to disembark. other places began to adopt such tactics such as the Italians where they prominently named it "Quaranta giorni". in the end 100-200million died across Eurasia.

Europeans also dealt with other Endemic diseases (diseases that have constantly maintained at a baseline level in a geographical area) such as Chickenpox, Measles, and Small Pox. these diseases where the ones brought over to the new world and led to the death of approximately 20 million deaths in the pre-Colombian population. "In the end, it was not bullets nor steel that conquered the Americas but instead microscopic life forms that did the deed".
The Spanish Flue of 1918 which infected 500 million worldwide yet in this case the Spanish flue impacted the young adults the hardest. half that succumbed to the infection were between the ages of 20 and 40, and 99% were under the age of 65. so by the end of 1920 50-10milion had died.

Unlike these previous pandemics, it is highly unlikely we will reach such amounts yet if we truly wish to survive we must evolve, Learn and Adapt. Like the famous movie adaptation of H.G wells war of the world narrated (Morgan Freeman) said  "...By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet's infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges. For neither do men live nor die in vain."