Outbreak

Disease name, basic facts

Also known as

Historic Impact

Famous person who died of it

Disease Fun fact

Where the disease stands today

The Bubonic Plague

Pathogen: bacterium Yersinia pestis

transmitted by: fleas on rats

Black death, The Great Mortality, Pestilence

Destroyed a third of Europe’s population in four years of the 1300’s – destroyed the power structures of both feudal society and the Catholic Church.

Three successive archbishops of Canterbury and seven of the Pope’s cardinals (this is pre People Magazine, don’t forget. That’s as famous as it got back then.)

Wacky attempt at treatment/cure: bloodletting

The end of the Plague is the beginning of the age of modern medicine – Pope Clement VI lifted the ban on dissection of human cadavers

A strain of the plague showed up in Madagascar in 1995 that is resistant to all known antibiotics…

Smallpox

Pathogen: the variola virus

Transmitted by: person to person

Brought with the explorers from Europe to the new world. Smallpox was essential to the conquest of North America because it killed off so many of the native people.

Montezuma

The Chinese had invented and practiced inoculation (deliberate infection with small amount of the disease, also known as vaccination) against smallpox hundreds of years before the rest of the world accepted it.

The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated from the wild in 1977. The virus is now believed confined to two freezers, one in the US and the other in Russia.

Yellow Fever

Pathogen: the flaviviridae virus

Transmitted by: the Aedes mosquito

Yech.

Stopped the
African slave trade. Ships full of slaves would not be sickened because they had childhood immunity, while the white ship’s crew would die at sea.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law

The Amistad mutiny was made possible because of yellow fever

Called yellow fever because the victim gets jaundiced before black vomit and death ensue

Major Walter Reed announced in 1900 that the mosquito transmitted the disease. Even though he wasn’t the guy who discovered this, he still got a hospital named after him.

The virus is known to exist in a strain of mosquitos that live on tree-dwelling monkeys in Africa. When we deforest this area, we risk bringing the disease down from the trees.

Cholera

Pathogen: bacterium vibrio cholerae

Transmitted by: contaminated water

Hyperanthraxis, spasmodic cholera, Asiatic cholera, convulsive nervous cholera, cholera asphyxia, malignant cholera, the blue fever (because you turn blue before you die), blue vomit, the yellow wind, the plague, the pestilence (these last two could really confuse it with Bubonic Plague, right?) also the black illness

Highlighted the desperate poverty and ghastly living conditions of newly industrialized Europe and America; lead to the development of modern sanitation AND, finally, finally put an end to the ridiculous “miasma” theory of disease.

No one named. Google search doesn’t produce much, but you know there have got to be some good ones.

Seven separate pandemics over 180 years. The last one started in 1961 and is not over yet.

The disease has its own goddess in India, Hulka Devi.

Before reforms, the Thames was called “The Big Stink” because it was the final repository of butcher’s waste, tannery effluent, and household garbage. It was also London’s main source of drinking water. Yum.

Could be eradicated today if all people on the planet had access to proper sanitation and water filtration systems.

Tuberculosis

Pathogen: mycobacterium tuberculosis

Transmitted by: airborne droplet

Consumption, pleural abcess, hectic fever, white plague, graveyard cough, spes moribunda (Latin for “dying hope”)

Lead to social acceptance of hygiene measures, including the search for effective personal deodorants.

John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, all three Bronte sisters, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederic Chopin.

At first it was thought to be cool to have TB. Romantics thought it indicated creative genius.

Thinking TB was no longer a health threat, funding to control its spread was cut in the ‘80’s. The re-emergence of drug resistant strains caused the WHO to proclaim a global TB emergency in 1993.

Influenza

Pathogen: various strains of virus

Transmitted by: contact

“The Purple Death,” and “The Spanish Lady”

Drastically changed the course of WWI – had a role in shaping the Versailles Treaty. Most notably, lead -accidentally – to the discovery of pennicillin

Woodrow Wilson suffered from it at Versailles, weakening his role and preventing him from pushing for the League of Nations.

In 1918 all citizens of San Francisco were required to wear gauze masks in public. The poorly constructed masks were later proven useless against the virus.

Scientists say that with the instability of the influenza virus, it is a question of when, not if, there will be another worldwide outbreak like that seen during WWI.