Mark Honigsbaum - The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19

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Copyright Mark Honigsbaum 2019
copyright Mark Honigsbaum 2020

Cover credit: Dan Mogford

Mark Honigsbaum has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by C. Hurst & Co. in 2019
This edition with new chapter and epilogue published by WH Allen in 2020

The epigraph taken from Albert Camuss La Peste, or The Plague, is reproduced with kind permission of Editions Gallimard Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1947.
All rights reserved.

The epigraph taken from Ren Dubos Despairing Optimist is reproduced with kind permission of The American Scholar (Vol. 48, No. 2, Spring 1949). The Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1949.

www.penguin.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9780753558294

The species of shark or sharks responsible for the attacks has never been identified. Some experts believe they were the work of a juvenile great white, Carcharodon carcharias; others that they are consistent with the feeding pattern of bull sharks, which are known to favour shallow coastal waters.

An epidemic is the rapid spread of infectious disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time. By contrast, a pandemic is an epidemic that has spread across a large region, for instance, multiple countries and continents. This spread may be rapid or may take many months or years. The World Health Organization defines a pandemic simply as the worldwide spread of a new disease.

In fact, polio is spread principally via the oral-faecal route and nonparalytic polio had been endemic to the United States for several decades prior to 1916.

Coronaviruses primarily infect the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts of mammals and are thought to be the cause of up to one-third of common colds.

The concepts of known knowns and unknown unknowns were infamously introduced into public discourse by the former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld at a Pentagon news conference in 2002 (see endnotes for further discussion).

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Influenza derives from the Latinate Italian phrase influenza coeli, meaning influence of the heavens.

Today the bacillus is referred to as Haemophilus influenzae.

Chick egg embryo cultivation is still the principal means of making flu vaccines.

Though McCoy states that the squirrel had bitten the boy on the hand, he goes on to say that it is uncertain whether the boy contracted plague this way, speculating that he may have contracted it from infected fleas, which is the more usual transmission route of plague from squirrels to humans.

Rabbits, pigs, coyotes, bobcats, badgers, bears, grey foxes and skunks can also be infected with plague, though they rarely exhibit symptoms. By contrast, domestic cats are highly susceptible.

Mercurochrome is the brand name for dibromohydroxymercurifluorescein, sometimes called merbromin. Its use was discontinued by the FDA in 1998 because of fears of potential mercury poisoning.

The swelling in Jesuss groin was almost certainly an inguinal bubo that had been allowed to drain for three weeks before anyone thought to examine it for plague bacilli. A culture subsequently revealed bipolar organisms, and when a laboratory animal was inoculated with the culture it died within twelve hours.

Plague bacilli multiply rapidly in X. cheopis, sometimes causing blockages that prevent ingested blood from reaching the fleas midgut. These blockages cause the flea to feed more voraciously, thereby increasing the chances it will retransmit the infection.

In patients treated with antibiotics the average fatality rate is 16 per cent. In the untreated, it ranges from 66 per cent to 93 per cent.

McCoy first isolated the bacterium of tularaemia in 1911 while examining squirrels for plague lesions in Tulare County, California. Transmitted by ticks, mites and lice, tularaemia is endemic to every state in the US, the principal reservoirs being wild rabbits and deer. In humans, the tick or deer fly bites can result in ulceration and swelling of the lymph glands; hence its confusion with plague.

In nonpsittacine birds, the infection is known as ornithosis.

The ease with which people contracted psittacosis in the presence of parrots was seen as further evidence that the infective agent must be an intestinal parasite, even though in many cases patients had not touched sick birds or handled their faecal matter but had merely been in the same room as them.

This was an important clue to the natural history of the disease, one that helped explain why wild birds were not continually dropping dead of psittacosis and epizootics were rare. However, the significance of the finding would only become apparent to researchers in the mid-1930s. See discussion below.

It also appears to have been motivated by the 192829 influenza epidemic, the worst flu outbreak since the 1918 pandemic, and chemists desire to apply their knowledge to medical problems. In 1948, the institutes name was pluralized to National Institutes of Health.

Rickettsia is the name for a family of bacteria transmitted by the bites of chiggers, ticks, fleas and lice. The best known rickettsial diseases are typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Many bacteria will continue to grow in tissue post-mortem, hence the importance of embalming and cold storage to prevent putrefaction. However, most bacteria that cause disease cannot survive more than a few hours in a dead body.

A serogroup is a group of bacteria that share a common antigen.

Oncovirus is the term for any virus that causes cancers or tumours.

It subsequently emerged that HTLV-III was identical to LAV and was almost certainly a contaminant from a virus that Montagnier had shared with Gallos lab.