As we have in the past, in this new age with notable failures we no longer shrug our shoulders and say “well that’s just the way things work in this unfair world” or “there’s a reason for everything” or “its God’s will.”
With our 21st century medicine and technology we acknowledge that when famine, war, or plague break out of control we must accept that someone screwed up and should promise to do better next time. There is no reason for anyone to go starving or a war to break out to a plague to spread further than where it started from. Only reason these things still happen today is because humans allow them.
In most places of the world the trial and error system has been beneficial. We mess up and learn what not to do next time. It works. For the first time, more people die today from eating too much than eating too little. More people die from old age rather than diseases. And more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined. We are more likely to die binge eating at McDonalds than from a terrorist attack or Ebola.
To claim that we have complete control over plagues, famine and war may strike people as outrageous or naive. What about the people scraping a living on $2 a day? Or the on going AIDS crisis in Africa or wars in Iraq and Syria?
In the 21st century if these things are still going on, it is usually caused by human politics not by natural catastrophe. It is now a choice.
Back in the day there was no choice, there were draughts and shortages everywhere. Open any history book and you will come across horrific accounts of famished populations, driven mad by hunger.
Seeking to prolong their lives, people used to eat cats and the flesh of horses they dug out from the dung heaps. They drank the blood from the cows when they were slaughtered. They boiled nettles and weeds for some source of nutrition.
Between 1692-1694 2.8 million people, 15% of the population died of starvation. In 1695 famine struck Estonia killing a fifth of the population. In 1696 famine killed a quarter or a third of the population in Finland. In 1695-1698 it hit Scottland. Some districts lost 20% of their inhabitants.
Most of us today do not have to experience wondering where our next meal will come from. Technological, economic and political developments have created an increasingly prosperous safety net separating human kind from the biological poverty line.
Of course mass famines still strike from time to time but again, mostly caused by the choices in human politics rather than a natural catastrophe. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is the fault of the humans in charge. Political famines.
Some private insurance schemes, international N 60’s, and government agencies will give people enough calories to survive each day. On a collective level, global trade network turns droughts and floods into business opportunities to make it possible to overcome food shortages quickly plus cheaply.
We have come a long way to say the least. Not to say famine is something to stop thinking or worrying about because it is still taking place, but not even close to the scale it was happening before.
In 2014 more than 2.1 billion were overweight. 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. They suspect by 2030 half of human kind will be overweight.
In 2010 famine and malnutrition killed about 1 million people as obesity killed 3 million.
History of plagues
After famine, our second biggest enemy was plagues and infectious diseases. People lived their lives in Ancient Athens or Medieval Florence knowing they may fall ill and die next week or that an epidemic might erupt and destroy entire families.
The Black death began back in the 1330’s in Central or East Asia. It was a Flea dwelling bacterium, when bitten by the Fleas people became infected. Medieval people personified the Black Death as a horrific demonic force beyond human comrephension or control. Humans back then did not think it ever possible to be the ones to create something in order to stop the spread. It wasn’t even fathomable so it must have been an evil spirit or punishment from the Creator.
The Black Death spread over Asia, Europe and North Africa. It took less than 20 years for it to reach the shores of the Atlantic ocean. There was 75-200 million deaths, more than a quarter in Eurasia. In England 4 out of 10 people died, the population dropped from 3.7 million to 2.2 million. Florence lost 50,000 of their 100,000 people.
Authorities were helpless. They performed mass prayers and processions but they had no clue how to stop it let alone cure it.
Until the modern era, humans blamed diseases on bad air, angry Gods and malicious demons. They did not suspect the idea of bacteria or viruses. They believed in demons, fairies and Angel’s but couldn’t fathom that a single drop of water or a flea could contain an entire squadron of deadly predators.
More disastrous epidemics struck America, Australlia and Pacific Islands following the arrival of the first Europeans. Explorers and settlers brought with them new infectious diseases which the Natives had no immunity to, causing a large amount of the population to die.
On March 5, 1520 a small Spanish group left the island of Cuba on it’s way to Mexico. It carried 900 Spanish soldiers, some horses, firearms and African Slaves. One of the slaves, Francisco Euguia carried small pox. Among his trillions of cells, a biological bomb was ticking away. Once landing in Mexico, the virus multiplied exponentially within his body.
An American family took him in who he infected, who infected the neighbors, who infected their family and friends. Within ten days Cempoallan, in Veracruz, Mexico became a graveyard.
Refugees spread it to nearby towns. New waves of scared refugees carried it from town to town further and further away. Town after town succumbed to the plague. Mexico and beyond.
Mayas in the Yucatan Peninsula believed that there were three evil Gods, Ekpetz, Vzzankak and Sojakak were flying from village to village at night time infecting everyone.
Aztecs blamed it on the Gods Tezcat Lipoca and Xipetotec or black magic of the white people.
Again, authorities had no idea what to do. Priests and doctors advised prayers, cold baths, rubbing their bodies with bitumen and rubbing squashed black beetles on their sores. It was of no use. Tens of thousands of bodies lay on the streets with no one daring to approach them to bury them, scared of catching the infection themselves. Entire families perished in days. Authorities ordered houses to be collapsed on top of bodies. In some settlements, half the population died.
In September of 1520 the plague reached the valley of Mexico. By October it reached Aztec. Within two months third of the population died.
March 1520 Spanish fleet arrived in Mexico which had 22 million people. In December only 14 million people were still alive.
Small pox was just the start. Waves of the flu, measles and other diseases came one after another. In 1580 the population was down to 2 million.
In January of 1778, British Explorer Captain James Cook reached Hawaii which had a population of 1.2 million. They were isolated from Europe and America therefore not exposed to their diseases. Captain Cook introduced the first flu, tuberculosis and Syphilis pathogens to Hawaii. European visitors added typhoid and small pox. In 1853 there were 70,000 survivors on Hawaii.
January of 1918 soldiers in trenches in Northern France were dying in their thousands from a violent strain of the flu: the Spanish flu.
Men plus mutations pouring in from Britian, the US, India, and Australlia. Oil from the middle east, grain and beef from Argentina, rubber from Malaya, copper from Congo. Not knowing the implications of their actions, the virus spread everywhere.
Within months half a billion-third of the global population-had the virus.
In India it killed 15 million people which was 5% of their population at the time. In Tahiti 14% of people died. Somoa, 20%. In Congo 1 out of 5 people perished. In less than a year it killed between 50-100 million people. In comparison the first world war only killed 40 million between the years of 1914-1918.
Children also faced smaller but regular waves of infectious diseases that killed millions of them every year. Children with low immunity were susceptible to disease. That’s why they were called childhood diseases. Until the 20th century about a third of children died before adulthood due to malnutrition or diseases.
The drastic change
In the last century we have become more vulnerable to epidemics due to the growing population as well as better transport. We are able to go wherever, whenever, (as long as we have a passport and arent criminals of course) making it so much easier to spread viruses. A virus can make it’s way from Congo to Tahiti in less than 24 hours.
Humans in the past probably assumed we would be living in an epidemiological hell with plague after plague, killing millions every time. However, both the incidence and impact of epidemics have gone down dramatically in the last few decades.
Global child mortality is at an all time low. Less than 5% of children die before adulthood. In the developed world, less than 1%.
Due to the achievements of the 20th century medicine we have vaccines, antibiotics, improved hygiene, and a better medical infrastructure.
The small pox vaccine was so successful in 1979, the World Health Organization declared that humanity won. It was the first epidemic that humans were able to wipe off the face of the earth. In 1967 it killed 2 million of the 5 million infected. In 2014 not one person was infected. The World Health Organization stopped vaccinating people because victory was so complete.
Every few years we are alarmed with an outbreak of a new plague. Sars was 2002/2003, Bird flu in 2005, Swine in 2009, Ebola in 2014.
With our efficient counter measures we resulted in small number of victims compared to back in the day. Sars killed less than 1000 people world wide. In September 2014 the World Health Organization said that Ebola in West Africa was the most severe public health emergency that they’ve seen in modern times. By 2015 it was reined in, by 2016 the World Health Organization declared it over. It infected 30,000, killed 11,000 of them. It caused some economic damage afterwards but never spread beyond West Africa.
AIDS seemingly the greatest medical failure of the last few decades, can be seen as a progress. There was a major break out in the 80’s where 30 million people died and 10’s of millions suffered debilitating physical and psychological damage. Medical professionals deemed it hard to understand let alone treat. And the thing with HIV is, unlike small pox where the virus dies within a few days, someone with HIV may seem healthy for months, not a clue that they carry it therefore widening the spread of the virus.
HIV itself doesn’t kill but instead destroys the immune system exposing the patient to a numerous of other diseases. In 1981 a doctor had a patient dying of pneumonia and one of cancer. They were both HIV patients. It was hard to find a cure for something that seemed so confusing.
In spite of the difficulties, after the medical community became aware of the plague, it took just two years to identify it, understand how it spreads and suggest effective ways to slow it down. Within ten years, medicines turned AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic condition. (If you could afford the treatment that is) if AIDS was a thing back in 1581 instead of 1981, no one would have figured out the cause, how it spread or how to stop it. There would have been millions of deaths.
“Despite the horrendous tolls AIDS has taken and despite the millions killed each year by long-established infectious diseases such as malaria, epidemics are a far smaller threat to human health today than in a previous millennia. The vast majority of people die from non-infectious illnesses such as cancer, heart disease or old age.” Says Yuval Noah Harari, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Human failure or natural calamity?
New infectious diseases appear mainly as a result of chance mutations in pathogen genomes. These mutations allow the pathogen to jump from animals to humans to overcome the human immune systems or to resist medicines such as antibiotics. Due to human impact on the environment, mutations probably occur and disseminate even faster than in the past. But when it comes to the race between doctors and germs, doctors run faster these days.
Every year doctors accumulate more and better knowledge to design and create more effective treatments and medicines. In 2015 doctors announced a new antibiotic- teixobactin which bacteria have no resistance which they assumed would prove to be a game-changer fighting against restraint germs. With modern medicine we now have new treatments that work in different ways. We got nano-robots that navigate through our bloodstreams identifying and killing pathogens and cancer cells. These are just small examples of how our medicine and treatments have advanced.
Micro organisms have 4 billion years of cumulative experience fighting off organic enemies but 0 experience fighting bionic predators. Experts found it difficult to evolve effective defences. An inexcusable human failure instead of natural calamity.
In 2014 a report criticized the World Health Organization for its unsatisfactory reaction to the Ebola outbreak who blamed the outbreak on corruption and inefficiency in the World Health Organization’s African Branch. They were accused of not responding quickly and forcefully enough.
Criticism assumes that humankind has the tools and the knowledge to prevent plagues and if an epidemic gets out of control it is due to human incompetence.
There are dangers in innate human nature itself. Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses but it turns humans themselves into an unusual threat. Same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable terrorist groups and armies to engineer even more terrible diseases and “doomsday pathogens.”
“Likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future, only if human kind itself creates them in the service of some ruthless ideology.” Says Yuval Noah Hariri, in his book Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, where he talks about how the world should look in years to come when comparing it to what has come already.
In thinking about how we should have the ability to control something like a plague these days it made me wonder about the newest Coronavirus that has taken over our free world today, Covid-19. Should we have predicted this? Should we have been more prepared? Was it man-made? If it was, was it released for the purpose of killing millions? For population control? Or was it just an experiment gone wrong that accidentally got away from the scientists? Or is it actually a natural catastrophe that started in bats or some sort of animal and spread to humans and we got pretty damn unlucky? Why weren’t we prepared if a epidemic seems to strike us every few years or so?
If you are interested in a variety of subjects such as mental health, inside the mind of disturbed artists, the importance of mental rehearsal and imagery, body language, power of being an introvert, power of our minds, metaphysics, mindfulness, abuse, addiction and more, please check out some of my other posts:
