The Coming Pandemic

The  Coming Pandemic

Pandemic- (n) an epidemic occurring on a scale which crosses international boundaries, usually affecting a large number of people. (source “Dictionary of Epidemiology” Oxford University Press, p. 179. Copyright 2012)

It is often said that what we don’t know can be deadly, and while humanity is always under the threat of extinction, be it from an unthinkable nuclear war, the strike of a large meteor on the surface of the earth, a gamma ray burst, or the eruption of a caldera which would result in a years-long blockage of sunlight, it is the microscopic world of viruses that pose the biggest threat to humanity.

Pandemics are nothing new. In 430 BC, a pandemic of Typhoid Fever wiped out 25% of Athens. Smallpox took the lives of as many as ten million during two outbreaks in the second and third centuries AD. Beginning in 541 AD, and lasting until 750 AD, the first pandemic of Bubonic Plague wiped out 25% of the known world population, and resulted in a 50% decline of the population in Europe. More infamously, it was the second wave of Bubonic Plague that killed 75 million people, beginning in the fourteenth century. Known as the Black Death, as much as third of the world’s population was completely wiped out during a six-year period, 1348-54 AD, and repeated waves of this plague continued to eviscerate as much as 50% of the European populace, up until the Great Fire of London in 1666 which virtually eradicated the disease in that city. Another wave of the Bubonic Plague hit China in 1855, spread to India, and killed an additional 10 million. Bubonic Plague even hit San Francisco, in the six years leading up to that city’s devastating earthquake in 1906, killing many thousands.

Smallpox, brought by Spanish conquistadores in the 1500s, virtually wiped out the native populations of Central America in the decades that followed- the same smallpox that killed off 90% of the Native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. Recurrences of smallpox, along with influenza and measles, ravaged the Plains Indian tribes in the mid-to-late 1800s, and killed millions around the world, as well.

More recently, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, infected 500 million people across the world in a brief eighteen-month period, and killed some 50 million during a six-month period during the height of its devastation- more than were killed in the First World War that was just ending when this pandemic began.

Respective outbreaks of Asian flu in the late 1950s, and Hong Kong flu in the late 1960s, killed three million people worldwide, including over 100,000 in the United States, alone.

Today, one third of the entire world’s population has been infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis- that’s two and a half billion people around the world. Five to ten percent of these people will progress to having active tuberculosis- that’s anywhere from one to two million people developing a disease which has a mortality rate in excess of 20%.

And then, there is Ebola. This excerpt from a CDC report dated 29 July 2014:

“Ebola hemorrhagic fever (Ebola HF) is one of numerous Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers. It is a severe, often fatal disease in humans and nonhuman primates (such as monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees). Ebola HF is caused by infection with a virus of the family Filoviridae, genus Ebola virus. When infection occurs, symptoms usually begin abruptly. The first Ebola virus species was discovered in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo near the Ebola River. Since then, outbreaks have appeared sporadically. The natural reservoir host of Ebola viruses remains unknown. However, on the basis of available evidence and the nature of similar viruses, researchers believe that the virus is zoonotic (animal-borne) with bats being the most likely reservoir. Four of the five subtypes occur in an animal host native to Africa”

The bad news is that Ebola hemorrhagic fever has an 80% mortality rate, and up to 100 health care workers who went to West Africa as part of a humanitarian effort to control the disease have become infected themselves, DESPITE the protective precautions these professionals have taken to prevent contracting the disease. Two of these professionals, Americans working for the Samaritan’s Purse, are now en route to the United States, destined for Emory University’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) is a decision that boggles the mind, when one considers the illnesses that are coming into this country by illegal aliens on our southern borders, 600 of whom have been placed in isolation for being infected with Tuberculosis.

Whether these latest developments are due to gross incompetence, intentional disregard for public safety, or some kind of ulterior and nefarious intent, by the Obama administration, is yet to be known- but this much we do know…the introduction of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever onto American soil is something we should all be attuned to and, combined with the health crises erupting from Obama’s decision to relax the deportation of illegal aliens who are carrying virulent diseases, is something that should not be tolerated, regardless of one’s political inclinations, moral philosophies or humanitarian concerns. To do otherwise, and abide in this onslaught, is morally repugnant, intellectually degenerate, and pandemically suicidal.

-Drew Nickell, 2 August 2014

© 2014, by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved