By Dr. Rajkumar Singh (Professor and Head Department of Political Science Bhupendra Narayan Mandal University)
Now the word “pandemic” is neither unknown for human history nor for the present generation. It is originated from the Greek word pan means “all’ and demos means “people”.
It covers both mass of the people and a vast area where this infectious disease has spread. In the sense, if a disease is spread in large area but the number of infected people is limited, it is not a pandemic.
Of the famous pandemic in history, it is small pox and tuberculosis, however, its recorded history began in the 14th century when the most fatal pandemic called Black Death or The Plague first appeared and took the costly life of 75-200 million people all over the world.
The great pandemic of history
In the whole human history, the most notable pandemic was the 1918 Influenza, also called the Spanish flu. At the time it infected about half a billion people around the globe even spread to the remote areas of Pacific islands and in the Arctic. Contrary to the most influenza outbreaks, which kills normally the very young and the very old, it recorded high mortality rate for young adults. In human history it has also a record of being the fastest killer. In first 25 weeks it killed the more people than the AIDS has done in first 25 years. It is also to mention here that 1918 was the closing year of first World War and the participating nations’ returning army became the spreading agents of this pandemic.
As several people consider, the single major factor for its being faster was the stress, malnourishment and chemical attacks during the war. In addition, the improved system of transportation had also played a role in quick transmission of the disease. It first appeared in March 1918 in US troops training camp but by October1918 it spread in so large area and declared a pandemic. As per an estimate in this pandemic about 50 million people died in India, 675,000 in the United States and 200,000 in the United Kingdom.
Beginning and kinds of current pandemic
In fact, coronaviruses or CoV are a large group of viruses that ranges illness from general cold to more severe, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV). The current CoV-19 is somewhat different from its earlier forms which was declared a pandemic. In the category of coronavirus some are zoonotic. The zoonotic CoV are transmitted between animals and people as for example the earlier SARS CoV was transmitted from civet cats to humans and MERS-CoV was from dromedary camels to human. Likewise, the source of current CoV-19 is bat, first originated in Wuhan, China.
There are several known coronaviruses present in animals have not yet transmitted in human, but we can not deny its possibility. Even in effect the coronaviruses are put in three categories- common, medium and severe. The first kind of its effect is mild and its signs include respiratory systems as fever, cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties. In the mild and severe cases’ signs it can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure and even death.
Role of WHO in pandemic
Taking lessons from pandemics that broke out in history, the present global health organisation called World Health Organisation (WHO), began to study further on different kinds of viruses and classified them in six stages. It’s a long process passing through which the animal virus enters the human body. The whole process starts generally when animals in mass quantity are infected from viruses and in few cases, animals infect the human.
In the next stage the viruses began to be transmitted directly between people in a sporadic way, and the stage ends when the infections in human from the virus have spread globally, moving from medium to high, high to certain probability and then to a pandemic in developing level. In the last three stages it moves only from human to human. Thus, the stage of pandemic comes only when its outbreak is global and global outbreak means that we are both the spread and its agent clearly.
In the context, the first document on preparedness of influenza pandemic was published by the WHO in 1999, and it was revised further in 2005 and 2009.The final revision of the document came in February 2009, and it does not have any mention of the 2009 H1N1 virus pandemic which came later in that very year. In a further development on the issue the United States Centre for Disease Control and prevention also published a document in which two pre-pandemic and four pandemic intervals were mentioned. In the document investigation and recognition are considered as pre-pandemic intervals while initiation, acceleration, declaration and preparation have been put in pandemic intervals. This American institution also adopted in the same year a Pandemic Severity Assessment Framework (PSAF) to measure the severity of the pandemic.
Road ahead in Covid-19 and thereafter
Normally, there are two basic strategy applied to control after its outbreak- containment and mitigation. Control of the disease can be done in the early stages by contact tracing and isolating the infected people to save the rest population from contamination. But when it is not possible to contain the spread of the disease then we move to mitigation stage in which different measures are adopted to slow the spread of the disease and manage its effect on society and the healthcare system. In addition, another strategy is of suppression which requires extreme and long – term non- pharmaceutical steps to reverse the pandemic. It includes stringent social distancing for wide population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine as done by China recently during the control of Covid-19.
In the context there are several factors that cause and provoke the epidemics and pandemics. In the first place the antibiotic- resistant microorganisms, sometimes referred to as superbugs contributes to the re- emergence of diseases which are currently under control. The World Health Organisation has also about the diseases which often occur on some intervals in different parts of the world. Here, we also want to mention that there is a close relation between the climate change and infectious diseases. Warming oceans and a change in climate ultimately brought an erratic fluctuation in weather all around the year and also introduce new climate to some regions.
This atmospherically altered situation is, in practice, responsible for new infectious diseases and re- emergence of the old. Another related aspect is over human population. It’s a situation when there are too many people for the environment to sustain or provide them with food, drinkable water, and fresh air. It is a damaging circumstance for the environment that it can not repair by itself. It increases births, a decline in mortality rates leading to the ecological and societal imbalances in nature. In other words, it invites infectious diseases to come and stay. Encroaching into wild lands is another area that directly affect the infectious diseases and we cannot overlook it for long.
Image Credit: Jung Yeon-Je | AFP
Author: Dr. Rajkumar Singh, Professor and Head, University Department of Political Science, B.N.Mandal University, Madhepura, Madhepura-852113, Bihar, India.
(The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights)