Plague & Pestilence
::edit:: I want to rewrite the conclusion of this, as it was very late at night when I finished and I was too tired to conclude correctly, because I actually changed my opinion slightly towards the end of writing this. I just haven't had the opportunity yet, so take my conclusion with a grain of salt.
(On a side note, I need to find somewhere to purchase that cursed card game.)
I have noticed that, in general, modern humanity is full of pansies.
Andrew sent me a couple links earlier this evening about diseases, about mumps in Iowa and, of course, bird flu doomsday predictions. The most interesting thing about modern pandemics is how propotionally few people die in them than died in ancient pandemics, and how big a fuss is made about them.
Just so we're clear on definitions, according to Wikipedia,
A pandemic is a widespread, possibly worldwide, epidemic. Take the total death tolls from 20th century pandemics and calculate the percent of the world's population that died, then compare them to past pandemics.
The Typhoid fever epidemic of Peloponnesian War killed 25% of Athenian troops and, over four years, 25% of the Athenian population. It most likely contributed to the eventual Athenian loss of the said war. As an interesting side note, it was only just, this past January, confirmed by University of Athens researchers, who analyzed teeth from a mass grave underneath the city, that the bacteria responsible was typhoid. Five million people are said to have died of smallpox during the Antonine Plague. The world population at the time was 170-400 million people, so it killed a significant percentage; 5,000 people a day were said to be dying in Rome.
The Justinian plague, the first recorded outbreak of bubonic, killed an estimated 25 million people when the world's population was between 190-206 million. Byzantine chroniclers recorded that 10,000 people a day were dying in Constantinople at its peak (regarded by historians to be inaccurately high, but still). It basically cost the Byzantine Empire control of western Europe, and plunged western Europe into the Dark Ages, which, when you look at the bubonic outbreaks of the 1300s, is almost a blessing. Those killed an estimated 20 million in six years while the world population was between 360-432 million, killing a quarter of the total European population and up to half the population of the worst-affected urban areas. Imagine how many more people would have died in that outbreak if Europe had been as well connected in the 1300s as it was during the Justinian plague. Did the 1918 influenza pandemic cost a superpower a continent? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Then there were the cholera pandemics of the 1800s. I couldn't find total death tolls for these, just X number of people dead in Y year in Z place, X varying from 1000 to 100,000, but they were almost thought of as foregone conclusions by the end of the 19th century (read some literature from the time to get a sense).
Typhus, emerged during the Crusades in the late 15th century. The world population was between 425-540 million. The Spanish lost 3,000 to war casualties and 20,000 to typhus in Granada, while fighting the Muslims. In the early 16th century, 18,000 French troops were lost to typhus in Italy, causing the French lose contol of Italy to the Spanish. Mid-16th century, 30,000 people died of typhus in the Balkans, fighting the Ottomans.
I'm not even going to touch on numbers of natives lost to diseases brought over by colonialists and colonists. It's touched upon in the Wikipedia pandemic entry, and it's horrifying.
By the time the 20th century influenza epidemics hit, there was just really no room for comparison. The Spanish flu, the 1918 pandemic everyone keeps going on about, killed about 50 million, while the world's population was between 1.5-1.7 billion. My mom sent me an interesting article several months ago about the purported link between self-medicating with aspirin and the pandemic. Sort of makes you remember that fevers do serve a purpose until they're high enough for long enough that they might be harmful. The Asian Flu in the late 1950s kills about 70 thousand in the United States, when the population in North America was about 187 million, and the Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s caused half as many deaths in the US when the North American population half again as large.
Meanwhile, worst case, worldwide death rate predictions are about 150 million, about 1.875% of the world's rapidly growing population, although more realistic estimates are 7.4 million, or .0925%. Further, we in the US are really overreacting. We have some of the best health care in the world. Most of those cases are not going to be in the US. It's really rather ridiculous.
We're actually worried on personal levels, ie, losing someone we love or contracting the illness ourselves. Only if you're really awesomely selfless do you have much concern for the faceless masses who might contract the illness. And when you really put it into perspective, no matter if the 150 million or the 7.4 million predictions are right, we are incredibly lucky to be placed where we are in humanities timeline.
Callous as it makes me sound, I'm not altogether appalled by the world catastrophes occurring. For a large part, mismanagement of world resources by humans have caused the immense damage we've been seeing with natural disasters; ie, we've brought it upon ourselves. Darwinianly speaking, humanity is long overdue for a pandemic, since disease and natural disasters are just about the only ways Darwinism has any power of homo Sapiens Sapiens. As long as the faceless masses remain faceless, I just hope that those I love and I stay safe, and since we take care of ourselves (or at least the people I love do, for the most part), there's not as much to fear from Darwin. What can I say? I'm a pansy.
References:
Historical Est. of World Population
US Pop
(On a side note, I need to find somewhere to purchase that cursed card game.)
I have noticed that, in general, modern humanity is full of pansies.
Andrew sent me a couple links earlier this evening about diseases, about mumps in Iowa and, of course, bird flu doomsday predictions. The most interesting thing about modern pandemics is how propotionally few people die in them than died in ancient pandemics, and how big a fuss is made about them.
Just so we're clear on definitions, according to Wikipedia,
...an epidemic (from Greek epi- upon + demos people) is a disease that appears as new cases in a given human population, during a given period, at a rate that substantially exceeds what is "expected", based on recent experience...
A pandemic is a widespread, possibly worldwide, epidemic. Take the total death tolls from 20th century pandemics and calculate the percent of the world's population that died, then compare them to past pandemics.
The Typhoid fever epidemic of Peloponnesian War killed 25% of Athenian troops and, over four years, 25% of the Athenian population. It most likely contributed to the eventual Athenian loss of the said war. As an interesting side note, it was only just, this past January, confirmed by University of Athens researchers, who analyzed teeth from a mass grave underneath the city, that the bacteria responsible was typhoid. Five million people are said to have died of smallpox during the Antonine Plague. The world population at the time was 170-400 million people, so it killed a significant percentage; 5,000 people a day were said to be dying in Rome.
The Justinian plague, the first recorded outbreak of bubonic, killed an estimated 25 million people when the world's population was between 190-206 million. Byzantine chroniclers recorded that 10,000 people a day were dying in Constantinople at its peak (regarded by historians to be inaccurately high, but still). It basically cost the Byzantine Empire control of western Europe, and plunged western Europe into the Dark Ages, which, when you look at the bubonic outbreaks of the 1300s, is almost a blessing. Those killed an estimated 20 million in six years while the world population was between 360-432 million, killing a quarter of the total European population and up to half the population of the worst-affected urban areas. Imagine how many more people would have died in that outbreak if Europe had been as well connected in the 1300s as it was during the Justinian plague. Did the 1918 influenza pandemic cost a superpower a continent? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Then there were the cholera pandemics of the 1800s. I couldn't find total death tolls for these, just X number of people dead in Y year in Z place, X varying from 1000 to 100,000, but they were almost thought of as foregone conclusions by the end of the 19th century (read some literature from the time to get a sense).
Typhus, emerged during the Crusades in the late 15th century. The world population was between 425-540 million. The Spanish lost 3,000 to war casualties and 20,000 to typhus in Granada, while fighting the Muslims. In the early 16th century, 18,000 French troops were lost to typhus in Italy, causing the French lose contol of Italy to the Spanish. Mid-16th century, 30,000 people died of typhus in the Balkans, fighting the Ottomans.
I'm not even going to touch on numbers of natives lost to diseases brought over by colonialists and colonists. It's touched upon in the Wikipedia pandemic entry, and it's horrifying.
By the time the 20th century influenza epidemics hit, there was just really no room for comparison. The Spanish flu, the 1918 pandemic everyone keeps going on about, killed about 50 million, while the world's population was between 1.5-1.7 billion. My mom sent me an interesting article several months ago about the purported link between self-medicating with aspirin and the pandemic. Sort of makes you remember that fevers do serve a purpose until they're high enough for long enough that they might be harmful. The Asian Flu in the late 1950s kills about 70 thousand in the United States, when the population in North America was about 187 million, and the Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s caused half as many deaths in the US when the North American population half again as large.
Meanwhile, worst case, worldwide death rate predictions are about 150 million, about 1.875% of the world's rapidly growing population, although more realistic estimates are 7.4 million, or .0925%. Further, we in the US are really overreacting. We have some of the best health care in the world. Most of those cases are not going to be in the US. It's really rather ridiculous.
We're actually worried on personal levels, ie, losing someone we love or contracting the illness ourselves. Only if you're really awesomely selfless do you have much concern for the faceless masses who might contract the illness. And when you really put it into perspective, no matter if the 150 million or the 7.4 million predictions are right, we are incredibly lucky to be placed where we are in humanities timeline.
Callous as it makes me sound, I'm not altogether appalled by the world catastrophes occurring. For a large part, mismanagement of world resources by humans have caused the immense damage we've been seeing with natural disasters; ie, we've brought it upon ourselves. Darwinianly speaking, humanity is long overdue for a pandemic, since disease and natural disasters are just about the only ways Darwinism has any power of homo Sapiens Sapiens. As long as the faceless masses remain faceless, I just hope that those I love and I stay safe, and since we take care of ourselves (or at least the people I love do, for the most part), there's not as much to fear from Darwin. What can I say? I'm a pansy.
References:
Historical Est. of World Population
US Pop
posted by Tiffany at 2:47 AM
1 Comments:
ha! ha! I'm using the internet!
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