History of human plague disasters
The "war" between mankind and the plague has been fought for more than ten thousand years. What has been recorded above is only a small part of the plague disasters that have occurred in human history. To this day, this war without smoke of gunfire continues. The earliest documented plague occurred in Athens between 430 and 427 BC. Between 1347 and 1351, a terrible plague broke out in Europe, killing more than 25 million people. When the Spaniards invaded Mexico in the 16th century, they brought terrible ceiling to the Americas. In 1520, Mexico still had 30 million inhabitants, and the invasion of smallpox left the country with only 3 million people left 40 years later, and only 1.6 million a century later. The worst plague of the 20th century was influenza. The flu during World War I was the worst. When the epidemic ended in November 1918, about 21 million people were killed, about double the number of people killed in World War I.
And then there's AIDS
Ebola virus. Thanks to the improvement of medical and health technology, these two plagues did not cause as many deaths and injuries as before, of course, people's fears of infectious diseases are well-founded. In human history, infectious diseases have killed and injured mankind far more than all wars combined.
However, to this day, there is only one infectious disease that has really been eliminated by humans - smallpox. In April 1979, the United Nations World Health Organization announced in Kenya that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide. The pathogenic smallpox virus is preserved in four world-renowned laboratories for research.
Before the historical record, smallpox was already popular among humans. Scientists have found smallpox-like scars on mummies from 1160 BC. In the 17th and 18th centuries, smallpox was the most serious infectious disease in the West. During the smallpox pandemic of 1616-1617, the Indian population of Massachusetts went extinct. In the early 18th century, nearly 40% of people died during a pandemic in Iceland. In Europe in the 18th century, 1 in 10 people died of the disease. Some historians have described it as having unusual beauty in 18th-century Europe as long as a woman's face has no traces of smallpox. Of course, the appalling plague is not just smallpox.
In 1348, a terrible plague broke out in Florence, Italy. Every polluted place, even every corner, was cleaned, orders were issued to prohibit the sick from entering the city, and all measures to protect health were implemented. People pray and plead again and again... But it does not work at all, and healthy people, even animals, will get sick and die if they touch the clothes of the sick or the dead.
Many fell to their deaths on the road, and corpses crisscrossed the streets. Often it was husband and wife, father and son, and brothers and families who were loaded on a shelf carrying corpses; the cemetery of the church and the ancestors of the family could no longer be accommodated, so they had to temporarily dig some long and wide pits around them and bury the bodies in hundreds and thousands, as if they were stuffing the cargo into the cabin.
According to statistics, 100,000 people died in Florence from March to July of that year alone. This terrible disease is the plague called the "Black Death." This year, the death toll in Europe was as high as 2.5 million, of which Italy died almost half of the population, France also reduced the population by 3/4, and the United Kingdom alone buried 50,000 bodies in a cemetery in London.
On par with the "Black Death" was cholera.
The breeding ground for cholera is India. Due to ancient traffic restrictions, India was isolated from countries around the world, and the spread of the disease was relatively slow, so until the beginning of the 19th century, cholera was mainly confined to the local area. However, as world trade continues to expand, the cholera virus has also been updated with "travel methods". Throughout the 19th century, cholera recorded 6 world pandemics, and the interruption was far shorter than the epidemic, from 1817 to 1926, and only for less than 30 years, people lived away from cholera with inner fear.
leprosy
Leprosy is an infectious disease as old as human civilization, but it is chronic and does not necessarily cause death.
According to medieval Christianity, a person suffering from leprosy is the result of sin that causes God's wrath. Therefore, in the real world, all lepers are regarded as "untouchable pariahs". In order to separate them from the ordinary people in Europe, some lepers were exiled to uninhabited islands in the sea. More countries are building a large number of hospitals to detain patients. Leprosy hospitals are very harsh on those who are punished by God.
King Edward III of England issued a proclamation in 1346 ordering the city of London and the counties of the country to confiscate all his property belonging to all lepers who refused to leave the city within a limited 15-day period. In other countries of medieval Europe, there were similar regulations. At that time in Britain, it was also stipulated that lepers could only wear one special piece of clothing: a black cloak with two white patches on the front chest that would be raised, and the same patch on the hat. In this way, not only will it be seen from a distance, but when it is approached, the patch will make a noise, which will cause the vigilance of others.
These excessively harsh decrees have greatly damaged the soul of lepers in addition to physical pain. Lepers had to wear cloaks, carry women and children, let the wind and rain blow, and live in hiding on street corners.
rabies
The face of the rabies virus is clearly presented in front of people's eyes for only more than 100 years, but the clear record of viral pathogens has been recorded more than 400 years ago. As early as 1566, cases of mad dog bites were recorded, but until 1885, it was not known what caused rabies.
In the era when bacteriological theory was dominant, the experiments of the famous French scientist Pasteur opened up a new path for the prevention and treatment of rabies. Pasteur found from practice that after injecting the rabies medulla containing the source of the disease into the rabbit several times, and then injecting these diminished virulence liquids into the dog, the dog can withstand the normal strength of the rabies virus infection.
However, most of these plagues occurred before the 19th century. Historians have called it the first plague epidemic.
The second plague epidemic period followed was from the 19th to the mid-20th century. During this period. World epidemic plagues include:
tuberculosis
According to the information, since the discovery of tuberculosis bacteria in Koho in 1882, the number of deaths due to tuberculosis has reached 200 million. The latest data show that the number of TB deaths worldwide has increased from 2.5 million in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2000. 75% of TB deaths occur in the most productive age group (15 to 45 years), and 2 billion people worldwide are already infected with TB, with an annual infection rate of 1%, or about 65 million people each year.
Third plague
The third plague pandemic, which began in the late 19th century (1894), broke out suddenly and peaked in the 1930s, affecting more than 60 countries in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa, with more than 10 million deaths.
The epidemic spread faster and spread far more widely than the previous two pandemics, and the plague has almost disappeared in North America, Europe and other places. However, in some parts of Asia and Africa, the situation of human-rat communion still appears from time to time.
influenza
The flu is the "murderer" who kills the most in history. In 1918, a deadly flu swept across the globe, killing between 20 million and 50 million people. Although the flu is known in the United States as "Ms. Spain," it appears to have originated in the United States in the first place and may have spread from pigs.
In that year, nearly one in four Americans got the flu, which killed more than 500,000 people, almost half of whom were able-bodied young people.
Although the usual popular flow is not so fatal, it also causes more than 110,000 hospitalizations and 34,000 deaths in the United States on average every year. As an infectious disease caused by a virus, influenza has no specific drug to treat, and can be prevented by injecting influenza vaccine, with an effective rate of 70% to 90%. Because influenza viruses are extremely susceptible to mutation and the types of influenza viruses circulating each year are different, they must be vaccinated annually to function.
The third epidemic was in the mid-20th century to the early 21st century. During this period, old and new plagues occurred frequently, and many new plagues were produced.
The haunting flu
There have been more than three influenza pandemics in the world, S Jie: the "Asian flu" caused by the influenza A virus (H2N2) that began in 1957, the "Hong Kong flu" caused by the influenza A virus (H3N2) in 1968, and the "Russia" caused by the influenza A virus (H1N1) that occurred in 1977
Flu".
During the 1957 "Asian flu" and 1968 "Hong Kong flu" outbreaks, all age groups were susceptible to infection and mortality increased, especially among the elderly over 65 years old. Mortality rates were also higher in people with high-risk factors ( e.g., cardiopulmonary disease ) , both of which affected many parts of the world.
During the 1957 "Asian flu" epidemic, a total of 70,000 people died in the United States. During the 1968 "Hong Kong flu" epidemic, 34,000 people died of infection in the United States.
From November 1977 to January 1978, the Soviet Union "Russian flu" epidemic. In January 1978, the "Russian flu" began to spread among American students and recruits. By the winter of 1978, infections were also endemic in many other countries.
dengue fever
Dengue fever is an acute infectious disease caused by the transmission of the dengue virus by the Aedes mosquito.
The term "dengue" is derived from Spanish and means pretense, which is to describe dengue fever patients who walk in a gait as if they were pretentious due to joint and muscle pain. Dengue fever is an ancient disease that has had many pandemics around the world in the 20th century, affecting millions of people.
In 1998, dengue fever had become the most important tropical infectious disease after malaria, with endemic trends in Southeast Asia.
West Nile virus
In the summer of 2002, the West Nile virus broke out again in the United States, and over the four years from 1999 to 2002, the mosquito-borne disease claimed dozens of lives and infected more than 100 people. West Nile virus was isolated from a woman in Uganda's West Nile region in 1937.
In recent years, it has appeared in temperate regions of Europe and North America. Experts believe that every 200 infections "West Nile"
Only 1 in those with the virus can cause a fatal disease, but for people with weakened immune systems, such as the elderly and chronically ill patients, the infection can cause encephalitis until death.
Ebola virus
On 14 October 2000, 51 people are currently infected in Ebola disease in the Gulu region of northern Uganda, 31 of whom have died. Ebola is the first ever seen in Uganda. The disease is transmitted by the Ebola virus through physical contact. People infected with the virus develop symptoms such as high fever, severe muscle pain, nasal, oral and bleeding, and may die within 24 hours. According to reports, Uganda's neighboring countries Sudan and Congo had Ebola epidemics in the 1970s and 1995, which killed many people.
The Black Death – a medieval nightmare
In 1348, an epidemic known as the plague began to spread across Europe. The disease spread from China along caravan trade routes to the Middle East and then to Europe by ship. One of the symptoms of the Black Death is that many dark spots appear on the skin of patients, so this special plague is called the "Black Death". For those infected with the disease, painful death is almost inevitable, and there is no possibility of cure.
The germs that cause the plague are brought by fleas hidden inside the fur of black rats. In the 14th century, the number of black rats was large. Once the disease occurs, it spreads rapidly. Between 1348 and 1350, a total of 25 million Europeans died of the Black Death. However, this epidemic did not end there. In the next 40 years,
It happens again and again.
So many people died of the Black Death that there was a shortage of labor. Entire villages were abandoned, farmland was deserted, and food production declined. The Black Death was immediately followed by many parts of Europe
famine.
AIDS – the plague of the 21st century
AIDS, short for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, is the final stage of HIV infection. It is a fatal, sexually transmitted infectious disease. HIV can destroy the human body
The immune system, if the immune system loses the ability to defend against common diseases that are not at all threatening in other cases, can be diagnosed with AIDS. Once this happens, the patient typically dies within 14 to 25 months.
In June 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control first reported 5 such cases, all of whom were homosexuals, and then patients with similar symptoms were found in the United States and other countries, and then spread on a large scale around the world.
It is clear that AIDS is causing great and growing damage to humanity. This epidemic has infected millions of viruses and viruses
For the end is inevitable death. To the patient
It is also a tragedy for relatives, who are not only emotionally miserable, but often end up in poverty. Since the majority of people who die of AIDS are young adults, the number of children who have lost one or both parents is increasing, and some of these orphans are suffering for life as a result of malnutrition and school dropouts, which is a tragedy for every patient and his family.