We’ve faced worse pandemics, Bronte Gossling

We’ve faced worse pandemics

Pathogens, plagues, and pestilences have been around since the bodies that house them. Bronte Gosslingshows us that COVID-19 isn’t the first global pandemic, and it won’t be the last.

UU NCERTAIN AND SIGNIFICANT THOUGH it is, the era of COVID-19 is not unprecedented. It’s not even the first coronavirus (that honour can be given to the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002) — even though unprecedented seems like it will be Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2020.

Communicable diseases — that is, infectious diseases that are contagious and can be transmitted between sources directly or indirectly — have existed since humans were hunter-gatherers, a lifestyle that started approximately 1.8 million years ago. It was when mankind progressed to an agrarian lifestyle between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago that the world quickly became a petri dish. Petri dishes, however, are easily contained, and variables can be controlled in a lab; epidemics, meanwhile, are no experiment, and newfangled close-knit communities coupled with increased proximity to domesticated animals created ideal conditions for diseases to spread between hosts like never before. When

trade routes developed internationally with advancements in technology, as did pandemics. Disease began changing hands on borderlines alongside spices, silks and sterling.

A cough, a cuddle, a congratulations; it’s hard to reconcile within oneself that something so simple, a mere moment in time, has the potential to fracture fragile federations, crucial alliances, stable economies and impregnable ideologies. Yet the social, political and economic structures of humanity are only as strong as the ones that build them, and pathogens have spent hundreds of thousands of years nipping at the heels and slipping through the cracks of any signs of weakness.

The world’s first ever epidemic

It’s fitting that the origins of the words epidemic, pandemic and panic are Greek, as that’s the site zero of the earliest recorded plague. Thought to be typhoid fever, The Great Plague of Athens began at the height of the city-state’s ‘Golden Age’ in 430 BCE, and spent three years terrorising its citizens. The weakened state of Athens’ army due to the plague is thought to be a contributing factor to Spartan victory of The Peloponnesian War, a war that historians have theorised would have resulted in the expansion of a Greek Empire, like the Romans, had the Athenians won.

While this epidemic was significant in terms of what might have been, it was not until over 1100 years later that a plague pandemic would significantly alter the course of history in actuality.

The Plague of Justinian (541 to 549 CE)

The Plague of Justinian was the first plague pandemic in a series of outbreaks that swept across the Mediterranean for more than 200 years before disappearing in 750 CE. Considered the first significant outbreak of the bubonic plague caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, the same bacteria of later infamous The Black Death (1346 to 1353 CE), it’s estimated that this specific outbreak, in addition to its death toll, directly resulted in the decline of the Byzantine Empire, and the expansion of the Arab Empire and coinciding worldwide spread of Islam.

While named after Constantinople’s (now Istanbul) Roman emperor of the time, Justinian I, who contracted the disease and survived, this specific outbreak originated in Egypt’s Pelusium, situated on the Nile Delta’s northern and eastern shores. Transmitting to humans via black rats (and their ever-loyal companions, fleas) stowed away on grain ships and carts, the disease spread both north to Alexandria and east to Palestine, quickly snowballing into a fever-inducing, necrotic death sentence for 25,000,000 to 100,000,000 people across the Near East, Mediterranean Basin, and Europe. To put that into perspective, the lowest estimated death toll is equal to the whole population of Australia.

The Columbian Exchange (1492 CE onwards)

Named after Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, the architect of the Americas, Bahamas, Haiti and Dominican Republic as we know them, the Columbian exchange refers to the widespread transfer of matter and ideas between the Americas, West Africa, Africa, Asia, and Europe as a result of Columbus’ 1492 voyage. Literature on this interchange overwhelmingly covers European colonial power structures and trade, particularly with and within the Americas — that, and the fact that Columbus himself brought syphilis to Europe. A sexually transmitted disease with the original bacterium Treponema pallidum only found in cattle or sheep before Columbus’ 1492 invasion, there’s been some interesting discourse on the exact how regarding the initial animal to human conveyance.

The Spanish moved people, technology, culture, knowledge, animals and plants between the Old World and the New World. Hitching a ride with Ferdinand II’s sponsored crew were European diseases such as smallpox, measles and the bubonic plague, which completely devastated indigenous populations due to the fact that they had never been exposed to the bacterium before, hence had not built up adequate natural immunity nor combative medicinal aids.

Columbus’ arrival on the island of Hispaniola — now Haiti and the Dominican Republic — resulted in the genocide of the Taíno people, where various diseases reduced their population from 60,000 people to 500 people by 1592. In December 1518, a smallpox epidemic aggressively spread through Hispaniola, with historians noting that at that stage, there were only 10,000 indigenous Taíno people still alive on the island.

By 1520, the Aztec Empire was weakened by smallpox so much so that its inhabitants could not tend to crops — contributing to food shortages — let alone resist Spanish colonists. This, coupled with the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America, sparked mass flora growth on previously cultivated land, as there was no one left to tend to agricultural land and fields to prevent trees and vegetation from taking over. All in all, this led to the reforestation of 55.8 million hectares. The increased demand for carbon dioxide to fuel these plants meant that 7.4 gigatonnes of carbon were extracted from the atmosphere, resulting in a notable atmospheric carbon dioxide drop in 1610 CE. Enough carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere to cool down the planet, contributing to the Little Ice Age.

Third Plague Pandemic (1855 to 1960 CE)

After The Black Death (1346 to 1353 CE), the world grew complacent as the grotesque horrors of the deadliest pandemic recorded in human history were reduced to the late modern period equivalent of summer campfire jump scares. Enter Yunnan, a province in southwest China. The mid-19th century was an unusually busy time for Yunnan; the region was experiencing an expeditious influx of Han Chinese migrants in search of natural minerals, predominantly copper, that were rich in southwest China at this time. The mining boom had exploded the population of Yunnan to over seven million people by 1850, with the increasing transportation throughout the province and wider China functioning as a vector of disease in a tale as old as time.

A plague-infected flea jumped ship to move onto bigger and better things from its homestead on the yellow-breasted rat, leaping from human, to animal, to duck-feather mattress, and so on, eventually moving to Hong Kong and India, and even South Africa and San Francisco. We now know that western Yunnan is home to a natural reservoir of the bubonic plague, and it’s still considered to be an ongoing health risk. Yet in 1855, all that was known was that a disease with symptoms similar to the mythical Black Death was in its early stages of massacring 15 million people across the world.

In March 1894, the city of Canton experienced a death toll of 80,000 people over a few weeks. The plague then rapidly spread to Hong Kong

through water traffic, with the special administrative region experiencing a death toll of 100,000 in two months. The plague then travelled from here further south to India via port cities, where the British were implementing oppressive pandemic policies that would eventually spark a revolt against the occupying forces. Yersinia pestis was now metamorphosing as the pneumonic plague as well as bubonic, resulting in 1,000,000 deaths in India and modern Pakistan within this outbreak, and then a further 12,500,000 over the next 30 years.

This specific pandemic led to several scientific breakthroughs surrounding the biological understanding of the bubonic plague. In particular, Hong Kong-based doctor Alexandre Yersin, was able to identify the bacterium Yersinia pestis as the cause of the disease in 1894, which ultimately led to the discovery that bites from rat-dwelling fleas was the main method of transmission to humans. It wasn’t until 1960, when cases dropped below a couple of hundred, that the Third Plague Pandemic was considered no longer active.

HIV/AIDS (1981 CE onwards)

One of the most thought-provoking pandemics in human history, human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) has had an estimated worldwide death toll of over 770,000 people since its discovery in 1981, with 37,900,000 people living with HIV in 2018. The lifelong progression of HIV follows a robust plan of attack on the immune system, increasing the risk of common opportunistic infections such as pneumonia or tuberculosis, as well as tumours. Late symptoms of the infection, such as swollen lymph nodes, fever and unintended weight loss, are referred to as AIDS.

HIV/AIDS’ impact extends beyond the physicality of the disease itself; due to its large association with the gay community, fear of infection was used to justify homophobia, and diagnoses often coincided with the nonvoluntary outing of the infected. Initial news reports of HIV/AIDS emerged largely by newspapers such as New York Native in May 1981, with five cases being clinically reported in the United States in June 1981. What followed was a wild goose chase to pin down the exact disease, as the known infected were showing symptoms of pneumonia, the rare Kaposi’s sarcoma, and lymphadenopathy, presenting researchers and doctors with puzzle pieces that were of complementary shapes and colours, but didn’t quite align.

Once the disease was properly identified in 1983, biomedical scientists, pathologists and historians began to trace its origin and pinpoint methods of transmission. In 1999, researchers discovered a strain of Simian

Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) in chimpanzees, which was almost identical to HIV in humans. Through retrospective blood testing, scientists put forward a likely scenario that the SIV disease spread from our close primates to HIV in humans around 1920 in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo through a ‘hunter’ situation, where the infected chimpanzees were consumed by humans, and their bodily fluids handled during food preparation. HIV was then retrospectively mapped to Haiti in the 1960s, followed by New York in the same decade and San Francisco in the 1970s, before being identified worldwide in the 1980s.

While Princess Diana famously shook hands, without gloves, with AIDS patients in London in 1987 in an effort to combat the stigma, misinformation campaigns and constant referrals to the United States’ Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) initial releases only fed the fear. Initial CDC releases identified atrisk groups as partners of people with AIDS, colloquialism of the “4-H Club”: homosexuals, haemophiliacs, heroin addicts and Haitians. The medical crisis was used as ammunition to perpetuate homophobia, classism, and racism in a twisted blame game — a phenomenon that

unfortunately has repeated itself with COVID19.

In March 2020, it was announced that a second person had been cured of HIV thanks to a stem cell transplant, joining original curee Timothy Ray Brown in this exclusive club. Therapies such as stem cell treatments for HIV need substantially more research before becoming viable, as such, HIV/AIDS is considered largely incurable — yet, with antiretroviral therapy, those with HIV can experience a near normal life expectancy. The early stages of this pandemic influenced modern disease control measures significantly; in particular, the horrors of the 1980s showed the value of wellcommunicated, accessible and well-designed public health campaigns, in addition to contact tracing — two things we are definitely benefitting from in our current unprecedented times.

For the full version of this article, head to the online website of The Comma and go to http://www.utsoc.com.au/thecomma/we ve-faced-worse-pandemics.

Pictures: Lucia Mai