World's Deadliest Epidemics , livre ebook

The World’s Deadliest Epidemics
101 Amazing Facts
Jack Goldstein
&
Frankie Taylor




Published in 2016 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
an imprint of
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The rights of Jack Goldstein and Frankie Taylor to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2016 Jack Goldstein & Frankie Taylor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All facts contained within this book have been researched from reputable sources. If any information is found to be false, please contact the publishers, who will be happy to make corrections for future editions.



Introduction
We have chosen to address in this book what are generally considered to be the eleven epidemics that have impacted the human race - or in some cases still have the potential to - more than any others. We look at how each crisis began, evolved and spread; we even ask if the human race is now considered safe from each threat. The conclusion we reach is, more often than not, a negative one. Whilst one may not wish to think about it too deeply, it is a fact that governments employ scientists specifically to consider worst-case scenarios. Incompetent as our leaders may be in other areas, they do actually have fully-detailed plans on how to deal with biological disasters on the kind of scale discussed within these pages. And yet even the best scientists in the world don’t necessarily have all the answers, meaning the future of the human race is far from guaranteed. Therefore if you are prone to worrying, if you are of a nervous disposition, and if you are one to lie awake in the dead of night considering your fate, you may wish to think twice before reading on...
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The Plague of Justinian It is the year 541. The Roman Empire has essentially split in two, with the Eastern section known as the Byzantine Empire , its capital Constantinople (Istanbul in the modern age). Within a year or so, the empire - and especially its beautiful and amazing capital city - will be devastated. Not by war, not due to a more powerful enemy... but by plague; a plague that will eventually kill fifty million people - at the time around a quarter of the world’s entire population. The cause of this particular pandemic is now confirmed to have been the same bacterium that was responsible for the bubonic plague . In fact, the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian share many similarities - not only in biological terms but also in the social and cultural impact that the outbreaks had on the people of the respective times. The plague is named after the man who was the Eastern Roman Emperor at the time - Justinian I. He actually contracted the disease himself, but did not die from it. The plague did outlive him however, returning time and again until the 8 th century. It is a generally accepted viewpoint that the history of Europe was completely transformed by the plague, with the balance of power shifting enormously as a direct result of its spread. The key method of transmission - also known as the vector - was through bites from fleas carrying infected blood from black rats. Locations such as grain stores saw huge populations of rats, and therefore wherever humans lived and worked in significant numbers, rats - and therefore their fleas - were nearby. At the plague’s peak, it was killing some five thousand people in the Empire’s capital every day - and it wasn’t just to Constantinople that the disease brought its particular brand of death. Very few locations around the eastern Mediterranean escaped, and around a quarter of the entire regions population lost their lives as a direct result of infection. It is believed today that this particular strain of the yersinia pestis bacterium originated in China, although it was brought to Europe via Egypt. Ships carrying grain from the Middle East brought with them infected rats which quickly spread the disease via fleas to the European population. We have first-hand accounts of the plague from historians of the era such as Procopius, who tells of an epidemic hitting Pelusuim, an Egyptian port near Suez. Another comes from a church historian by the name of Evagrius Scholasticus, who actually caught the plague as a child, even displaying the buboes after which the disease is named - and yet, thankfully, survived! Although - as with most historical epidemics - we only have estimates to go by, we have no reason to doubt the figures provided by these historians. Procopius tells us that at the plague’s height, some ten thousand people were dying every day in Constantinople. The entire city stank of death, and corpses were literally stacked high in the streets. In the end, fourty per cent of the city’s inhabitants lost their lives. The sheer number of people dying affected the empire in two distinct ways: firstly economically - tax income was severely reduced; secondly, there were simply fewer men available to fight for the empire as soldiers. Due to these combined effects, the Goths (who had almost been defeated by Justinian) saw a resurgence in strength; the Western and Eastern empires had so nearly re-joined one another, yet didn’t quite make it, meaning the Lombards could take Italy. The Saxons were able to focus their strength on conquering Britain instead of focusing on an eastern defensive position, and the Arabs were able to put up a strong fight in the Byzantine-Arab wars, whereas they would have been overwhelmed had the population been at pre-541 AD levels. Recent studies have shown that although movement of people (specifically the grain ships) had a major hand in the spread of disease, it wasn’t necessarily the key factor that led to such a large pandemic. For death to appear on such a huge scale, there has to be an additional factor, something that didn’t happen in other years. In the case of the Plague of Justinian, this ‘extreme event’ was the volcanic winter of 535/536 AD. This particular winter saw the most severe short-term episode of climate cooling in the Northern Hemisphere for two thousand years. Whist the cause is disputed - some say a major volcanic eruption in the tropics, others an impact from a large body from space - the results are well-known: crop failures, famine and unseasonal weather. Scientists now believe that the fallout from this - be it reduced immune systems due to malnourishment, or a climate particularly conducive to the breeding of the yersinia pestis bacterium - was the tipping point, that additional factor which meant the plague could expand at a previously unseen rate. The fate of Britain during the Plague of Justinian is somewhat unknown. There are no surviving historical documents from the period that mention the outbreak, however other evidence (for instance archaeological) shows that in the 6th century AD Britain had strong trading links with Gaul. It would therefore have been highly improbable for the outbreak not to have reached the country. There is a reference to a Welsh noble - Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd - who died of the ‘Yellow Plague of Rhos’ in 547 AD, and around thirteen years later the important Roman town of Calleva appears to have been abandoned, again with the most likely culprit being a severe outbreak of the plague. So is the plague of Justinian still a danger to us today? Certainly in developed countries, levels of hygiene are much better than they were back then. But although the outbreak eventually subsided during the eight century AD, the bacterium responsible did return centuries later to devastating effect. It is possible that it could return again, but perhaps mutated into a form that is resistant to antibiotics, much like today’s superbugs. And if that coincided with a further mutation enabling airborne transmission, one would be foolish to think such a powerful disease could be controlled, no matter how advanced modern medicine has become.


Detail of a contemporary mosaic of Justinian I, the Eastern Roman Emperor at the time of the plague’s outbreak; he contracted the disease himself but still survived



The Black Death The Black Death is widely considered to be one of Europe’s all-time greatest catastrophes. It saw over half the continent’s inhabitants wiped out, and it took some three hundred years for the population level to recover. The name itself conjures up terrible images, and is rather fitting - but actually it is believed to me a mis-translation of the Latin word atra which can mean both black and terrible . Although we cannot be sure of the exact number of people who died, upper estimates suggest that two hundred million people lost their lives between 1346 and 1353 AD.