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    Pandemic History: Facts You Wish To Know From Spanish Flu To The Current Events. Truth And Lies
    Pandemic History: Facts You Wish To Know From Spanish Flu To The Current Events. Truth And Lies
    Pandemic History: Facts You Wish To Know From Spanish Flu To The Current Events. Truth And Lies
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Pandemic History: Facts You Wish To Know From Spanish Flu To The Current Events. Truth And Lies

    By Victor Cohen

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    What do You know about Pandemics!? Facts and Fiction! Which is the Current Situation?! What will happen in the future?!
    Intermittent infectious disease outbreaks have had significant and enduring effects on populations throughout history. The cultural, political, and social facets of human society have been profoundly influenced by these events, with their consequences frequently lasting for centuries. Many of the fundamental concepts of modern medicine have been established by influenza outbreaks, forcing the medical community to develop concepts of epidemiology, prevention, immunization and antimicrobial treatment. The chapter describes some of the most important outbreaks that have occurred in human history and are applicable to understanding the rest of the material better. Starting with religious texts that relate heavily to plagues, this chapter sets out the basics for our understanding of the nature, financial, medical and psychological effects that such pandemics have had on humanity, including the Black Death (a plague epidemic of the fourteenth century), the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the more recent outbreaks of the twenty-first century, including COVID-19.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVictor Cohen
    Release dateMay 16, 2020
    ISBN9780463388464
    Pandemic History: Facts You Wish To Know From Spanish Flu To The Current Events. Truth And Lies
    Author

    Victor Cohen

    I was born in 1974. I have lived in many places in the world and now I live in Italy. After my studies I enrolled in the Air Force as a Pilot Officer. Not having completed the whole pilot training process, I became an Air Traffic Controller. After some experiences oversea and assignments at NATO, I currently live in Rome. I have a passion for the research of facts and events that condition our life or that have profoundly affected the society and the world in which we live.

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      Book preview

      Pandemic History - Victor Cohen

      PANDEMIC HISTORY

      Facts you Wish to Know From Spanish Flu to the Current Events. Truth and Lies

      PANDEMIC HISTORY1

      Facts you Wish to Know From Spanish Flu to the Current Events. Truth and Lies1

      INTRODUCTION3

      CHAPTER ONE7

      Pandemics And Epidemics7

      CHAPTER TWO17

      Some Pandemic To Note17

      CHAPTER THREE54

      The Covid-19 Pandemic54

      CHAPTER FOUR82

      Fact Vs. Friction82

      CHAPTER FIVE86

      Current Situation And Responses86

      CHAPTER SIX106

      International Responses106

      CHAPTER SEVEN115

      Impact Of The Pandemic115

      CHAPTER EIGHT129

      Future Predictions - Post-Pandemic129

      INTRODUCTION

      Intermittent infectious disease outbreaks have had significant and enduring effects on populations throughout history. The cultural, political, and social facets of human society have been profoundly influenced by these events, with their consequences frequently lasting for centuries. Many of the fundamental concepts of modern medicine have been established by influenza outbreaks, forcing the medical community to develop concepts of epidemiology, prevention, immunization and antimicrobial treatment. The chapter describes some of the most important outbreaks that have occurred in human history and are applicable to understanding the rest of the material better. Starting with religious texts that relate heavily to plagues, this chapter sets out the basics for our understanding of the nature, financial, medical and psychological effects that such pandemics have had on humanity, including the Black Death (a plague epidemic of the fourteenth century), the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the more recent outbreaks of the twenty-first century, including S.

      Very few phenomena in human history have influenced the way infectious disease outbreaks have affected our communities and cultures; but relatively little attention has been given to these phenomena in behavioral social science and in branches of medicine that are, at least in part, based in social studies (e.g. psychiatry).

      This lack of concern is disturbing, as an outbreak of a pandemic has been one of the greatest catastrophes ever, if not the greatest, in all of human history. Over the course of history, pandemic outbreaks have decimated cultures, dictated war results, wiped out whole populations, but also, paradoxically, paved the way for inventions and advancements in sciences (including medicine and public health), finance, and political structures. Pandemic outbreaks, or plagues, as they are sometimes called, have been closely studied in the field of history, including the history of medicine, through the prism of humanities. However, in the age of modern humanities, very little attention has been paid to ways in which plagues influence the individual and group psychology of afflicted societies. This includes the unexamined ways in which pandemic outbreaks may have influenced the practice of psychiatry; at the time the last big pandemic was making global rounds a century ago, psychoanalysis was gaining acceptance as being a proven therapy within the medical community.

      There is a single word that can serve as a suitable starting point for our brief trip through the history of pandemics which is the plague word. Originating from the Doric Greek word plaga, the word plague is a polyseme, interchangeably used to describe a specific, virulent infectious febrile disease caused by Yersinia pestis as a general term for any contagious disease that causes a high mortality rate, or more generally as a metaphor for any sudden outbreak of a catastrophic evil or affliction. This word in Greek can refer to any kind of illness; in Latin, the words are plaga and pestis Perhaps the best-known examples of plagues ever reported are those referred to in the biblical scriptures that serve as foundations for Abrahamic religions, beginning with the Old Testament. Book of Exodus describes a series of ten plagues to hit the Egyptians before the Israelites are eventually freed, kept in captivity by Egypt's king, the Pharaoh. Some of those poorly described plagues are presumably simple events, but at least a few of them are evidently contagious in nature. Lice, diseased animals, burns, and probable firstborn deaths possibly represent a number of infectious diseases, zoonoses, and parasitosis.

      Pandemic outbreaks in the Biblical sense are the bookends of human life, considered both a part of emerging human cultures and a part of the very end of civilization. Seven bowls of God's wrath would be poured on the World by angels in the Apocalypse or The Book of Prophecy, again some of the bowls containing plagues likely to be contagious: And the first angel went and poured out his bowl on the world, and dangerous and painful sores fell upon the men who bore the mark of the beast (Apocalypse 16:2).

      Such incidents, whatever empirical facts, have profoundly influenced human history and continue to be commemorated across the world in religious traditions. As we can see, the assumptions associated with these fundamental accounts is embedded in Western cultural responses to pandemics, and continue to influence public opinion and understanding of current and future outbreaks. Examined through the prism of the Abrahamic biblical sense, serious disease outbreaks may also be interpreted as Divine retribution for sins (of the entire community or its outcast segments) or, in its eschatological version, as events heralding the End of Days (i.e., the end of the world).

      There have been documented processions of pandemics throughout known, primarily Western history that each influenced our culture and our society, including shaping the very basic concepts of modern health sciences. What follows is an overview of global pandemic outbreaks spanning the twenty-first century all across recorded history.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Pandemics And Epidemics

      What are Epidemics and Pandemics? An outbreak is commonly known as a sudden, widespread rise in the incidence of the disease at a given time. A pandemic is generally known as an exceptionally large outbreak. Ebola in 2014 was not also a pandemic by some scale. In 1918 the disease that killed 50 million people worldwide was a pandemic.

      As events, a common way of thinking about epidemics and pandemics is through. They come and go. But can we call HIV / AIDS a pandemic if we think about them in this way? Or maybe tuberculosis? What's up with malaria? Pandemics can either be single events or what I would call recurrent pandemics. Continuing pandemics are tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV / AIDS, which affect vast swaths of the globe and kill millions and millions every year.

      Following the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the debate has arisen about the World Health Organization (WHO) and other interpretation of pandemics. In response, a number of infectious disease experts at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have created a specific structure that can work to help determine what a pandemic is and was.

      We proposed that it would meet eight criteria: large geographic range, movement of pathogens, high levels of attack and explosiveness, minimum immunity of the population, novelty, infectiousness, contagiousness and severity. TB, HIV / AIDS and malaria do not seem novel. But their evolving TB profiles are getting worse in one place, then better in another; XDR-TB is emerging, and they are becoming novel again. Every unique historical context is a novel one. Malaria gained a new name in the 1950s when the World Health Organization sought to eliminate it; it took on another in the 1970s and 1980s when the World Bank became the major global health player. Likewise, with HIV / AIDS; its identity has evolved so much overtime that it has developed numerous, culturally dependent, novel identities: a death sentence, a persistent and manageable illness, a gay disorder, a heterosexual condition.

      There are a variety of themes and subjects relating the epidemics and pandemic history. As a result of the late nineteenth-century laboratory movement, a movement that led to the era of modern medicine in which we now live

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