The coronavirus is surging again, thanks in part to new, more virulent variants, and thanks in part to many people’s carelessness, or even refusal, to follow basic health precautions. There’s no question this one is going down in the history books, because we don’t get pandemics all that often.
A contagious disease is ENdemic when it’s widespread, but mostly stays within one particular group or location. It’s EPIdemic when it’s spreading through a wider area. And it’s PANdemic when it’s widespread all over the map.
Lately both COVID and HIV/AIDS are considered pandemic. So was the Spanish Flu, a hundred years back.
We’ve talked about Spanish Influenza in this space, but there are other diseases that have been very troublesome for our area. Right at the beginning of white-people history in our region, they had a major problem with Genesee Fever, which led to the first burial in Bath, for Christian Williamson, a seven year-old girl.
Diagnosing across two centuries is challenging, but a fair number of knowledgeable people figure that Genesee Fever was malaria. Spread by mosquitoes, it can cause severe alternating fever and chills, along with exhaustion, vomiting, and headache. It’s a killer, especially when there’s very little way to abate the fever.
Much more recently, many of us still shudder at the mention of polio, which can lead to full or (more often) partial paralysis, if not death. The lucky ones limped or were otherwise limited. In more severe cases, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, they spent their lives in a wheelchair – for VERY severe cases, in an iron lung.
When cases rose, often in summer, people panicked. They kept their kids at home – NOT what kids wanted to do in summer vacation! Beaches and pools and movie theaters were closed, and so were summer camps.
Hooray for Dr. Jonas Salk! In the 1950s he came up with the world’s first vaccine for that horrible disease. Long lines snaked around schools and community centers as entire neighborhoods waited their turn to get vaccinated. Worldwide cases now are well under a thousand a year.
While some Republican leaders publicly disdain vaccines, Senator Mitch McConnell isn’t one of them. He got polio (“infantile paralysis”) in 1944, when he was two years old. His family almost went broke on treatments, but the Roosevelt Institute at Warm Springs helped him get started on the way to recovery.
A hundred years ago and more, each New York county was required to maintain a tuberculosis sanitarium – Steuben’s was where the Bath V.F.W. is now. For a long time there was no real treatment for “consumption,” though trips to the desert or the Adirondacks, with cleaner air, sometimes eased symptoms.
Robert Koch got the Nobel Prize “just” for identifying the bacillus, without even a treatment or preventive yet. It killed James Monroe and Andrew Jackson, George Orwell and Henry David Thoreau. In some states it was a crime to publicly state that someone had TB, since they would instantly be ostracized. Public health improvements, including milk inspection, reduced the cases until antibiotics appeared – at last it wasn’t a life (and often death) sentence – from then on, people could actually recover.
Cholera, typhus, typhoid fever… measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox… some are milder than others, but all took their toll in days gone by. We’ll look at them in some future blog. For now, though, we’ve spread enough gloom. The GOOD news is that all the diseases we’ve mentioned can now be prevented or cured – or both! The good old days are one thing. When it comes to health care, give me the good NEW days every time!