Connie Goldsmith - Pandemic: How Climate, the Environment, and Superbugs Increase the Risk

A recent blood meal is visible in this mosquitos transparent gut. As it feeds, the mosquito can spread the malaria parasite and the viruses that cause Zika, dengue, and chikungunya.

Pandemics (disease outbreaks that affect many people in many parts of the world) can bring the human race to its knees. History is filled with stories of such devastation. For example, in the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out at least 17 percent of the worlds population. In modern times, epidemics (diseases that affect a large number of people in several places) have begun invading news reports around the globe.

In 1999 West Nile virus, spread by mosquitoes, reached the United States, and it has since spread to nearly every state. In 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) infected thousands of people and killed hundreds around the world. More recently, the Ebola and Zika viruses have spread death and tragedy on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Foodborne illnesses sicken an estimated forty-eight million Americans each year, killing thousands. And each year, like clockwork, one or more new strains of the flu begin to make the rounds.

No More Epidemics is an international campaign dedicated to preparing the world for epidemics and pandemics. Based on the worlds population and infection rates of past pandemics, experts affiliated with the campaign predict that the worlds next pandemic could kill between 180 and 360 million people during its first year alone. In 2017 many disease experts predicted that a pandemic is likely to occur within the next two or three decades. Some say it could be as soon as ten to fifteen years.

Several of the bacteria and viruses that have made headlines in the twenty-first century could cause the planets next pandemic. New diseases are becoming more common, and old ones are reappearing more often. And the spread of all of these diseases has to do with human activity.

Know Your Demics

Epidemiologistsscientists who study diseasesrate the severity of a particular disease occurring at a given time in one of four ways:

• Outbreaks strike a limited number of people in a limited area and last a short time. Monkeypox, a distant relative of smallpox, appeared for the first time in the United States in 2003. During the two-month outbreak, more than seventy people in six midwestern states developed monkeypox.
• Endemics are diseases that are always present in a region. For example, malaria is endemic in several countries in Africa, such as Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and Uganda.
• Epidemics hit a large number of people in several areas at the same time. In 20142015, scientists classified Ebola as an epidemic because it infected large numbers of people in three countries in West Africa.
• Pandemics affect many people in many parts of the world at the same time. For example, the Spanish flu of 19181919, which sickened millions of people around the world, was a true pandemic.