Diseases, plagues, and pandemics have been part of life for humans since the dawn of time.
Every day, people contend with a myriad of ailments ranging from the common cold and flu to dangerous afflictions such as cancer, heart disease, measles and some sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
As someone who enjoys studying history, I have also delved into various pandemics and outbreaks that have occurred over the past thousand years.
Alarmingly, a number of these diseases took place during the 20th Century, including the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, the polio epidemic that took untold numbers of lives from around the year 1900 to the mid-1950s, tuberculosis, as well as the AIDS crisis that shook the world in the 1980s and ‘90s.
A few years ago, the world experienced what many consider to be the biggest pandemic to occur in a century, COVID-19. While COVID has largely disappeared from the public consciousness over the past few years, that two-year pandemic killed many and caused a considerable amount of economic strife globally.
While many diseases from the past have been long forgotten, we need to ask ourselves if some of these could ever make a comeback. Polio, once infamously known as ‘The Crippler,’ has largely been eradicated, save for a few countries. However, in recent years, there have been increasing reports of polio cases in western countries.
An even more pressing question that needs to be asked is whether modern medicine will be able to fight back should old diseases such as polio, tuberculosis, or even scarlet fever ever become a threat to the world once again.
Would we have the ability to control these diseases through antibiotics and vaccination? Or would be find ourselves in a very dangerous scenario such as was the case in the past?
I aim to hope for the best, but as always, be prepared for the worst. In any event, it’s quite interesting to study and learn from these chapters in our history so that hopefully, we can avoid such catastrophes in the future.
