The Greatest Achievements in Human History! Invincible Wars against Epidemic Diseases

I thought it happened only in history books that the whole world could be transformed due to an epidemic disease.
But the Corona virus (COVID-19) has materialized such fears.
Nonetheless, in human history, such epidemics have often occurred.
No matter how fearful we are of COVID-19, there is hope borne out by the fact that
humankind has ultimately conquered all these diseases.
Let’s take a look at the history of such invincible wars that humankind has fought against these epidemics.
Article. Editor’s Office

Recorded the highest number of deaths in epidemic history

malaria

Is there anyone who has not heard of malaria? Malaria is the number one disease that has caused three billion deaths in the history of infectious diseases. The reason why this disease is known to everyone is that even though the death toll is declining, it is a disease that has not been conquered yet. A person with malaria suffers from high fever, diarrhea, and headache, and eventually often dies. It occurs a lot in the tropics in hot and humid weather, and it is highly contagious because the host is a mosquito.
In the early days, however, malaria was the subject of fear, especially among Europeans. Because it was a disease that developed only in hot regions such as Africa, Europeans who had no immunity to it at all inevitably died if they were infected. In fact, as long ago as in 323 B.C., Alexander the Great of Greece died of malaria in a swamp in southern Iraq while planning an expedition to Arabia and Africa. And Europeans, who had advanced into Africa since the 15th century, could not enter the continent’s interior and stayed only in the coastal areas of Africa for 400 years.

As such, malaria, which has terrorized humankind for so long, received a ray of hope in 1820 when the French chemist Pierre Joseph Pelletier invented quinine, a drug that treats fever. Since then, people who go to hot and humid regions, such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia as well as Africa, carry quinine as a household medicine and are no longer afraid of this disease.

bringing the concept of hygiene to life

cholera

There is another reason why an epidemic is scary. In addition to causing a lot of deaths, pandemics often reappear when people feel the pandemic has been subdued. In the case of cholera, it is highly affected by the season and the environment, and for this reason, warnings are issued periodically. Once infected, a person with cholera suffers from severe diarrhea and vomiting, high fever, dehydration, and dies of debilitation.

Cholera was an endemic disease in India. Then, from the early 19th century, when British colonial rule began, it spread to Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Africa through the British naval fleet. Throughout the 19th century, nearly 10 million people died of cholera. In Russia, where cholera hit the hardest among Western countries, over a million people died of cholera between 1847 and 1851.

The reason why Western countries were most affected by cholera was that those countries had no proper sewage systems, and rivers and streams were severely polluted. The river Thames, flowing through London, the capital of England, was filled with excrement and domestic wastes, and the sewerage was flooded with corpses of dogs and cats, discarded clothes and horse dung. As many people used this dirty Thames water as water for daily living, they were inevitably infested with cholera.

Then, Western doctors and scientists who were studying cholera found that the main cause of cholera was water contaminated with the cholera virus. Since then, with the introduction of major water treatment systems that filter virus bacteria from the sewer network supplying water, killing bacteria harmful to the human body by releasing chlorine, cholera began to disappear. Of course, the disease has not completely gone away yet, but it can be prevented and cured just by knowing the cause, so cholera is no longer a subject of fear.

the first disease that humanity has completely conquered

smallpox

Smallpox is a disease that terrified mankind relatively till recently. Smallpox is transmitted by air to humans through virus-contaminated mice as the hosts. Once a person is infected, a nasty rash occurs all over the body and causes high fever, resulting in blindness, or affecting the brain. Even if a person is lucky enough to survive, he or she suffers severe after-effects, such as scars on the face.

The disease, which terrified people till recently, has a very long history. King Ramses V, the king of Egypt, died of smallpox in 1157 B.C. Korea was ravaged by smallpox since the era of the Three Kingdoms, and in the West, nearly 90% of Native Americans, who had no immunity at all, died of this disease through contact with Europeans.

Then in 1798, history started to change with the spread of a vaccination, founded by the British doctor Edward Jenner. Jenner found that cowpox, a kind of smallpox that cows suffers from, has much lighter symptoms than smallpox and is naturally healed, and most of all, after a long observation, he discovered that people who have had cowpox never get smallpox. Edward Jenner therefore developed a vaccine from the pus of a cow infected with cowpox.

But anything filled people with fear in the early days. At first, it was difficult to vaccinate people because of the rumors that a person would change like a cow if he/she is vaccinated. However, as time went by, it became a proven fact that getting a vaccine could prevent smallpox, and it has since been widely accepted by countries around the world. Thus, around 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union jointly invested enormous amounts of money into eradicating smallpox, and vaccines were distributed free of charge to countries around the world. And finally, in 1978, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that smallpox had been eradicated.

the driving force behind Korea’s quarantine system

SARS

And even in the 2000s, the emergence of another epidemic horrified people in various ways. Severe acute respiratory syndrome, also known as SARS, which swept the world in 2003, began to be transmitted by air. Symptoms are similar to flu, accompanied by high fever, coughing and muscle pain, and sometimes severe pneumonia and breathing difficulties. The cause was a virus transmitted from musk cats. Residents in Guangdong Province in southern China, where the disease broke out, liked to eat dishes made from musk cats.

As a result of the outbreak of SARS, about 8,000 people around the world were infected with SARS in 2003, of which 700 died. In order to prevent SARS, the Guangdong provincial government of China banned the consumption of musk cats, and implemented an extreme policy of slaughtering 10,000 musk cats in order to eliminate the cause of the SARS virus. The government also quickly built a hospital to accommodate and treat SARS-infected people, emphasizing to the public the importance of use of masks and hand washing. Even though the disease made humanity tremble with fear for an instant, SARS disappeared from July of that year.

Korea, which borders China, was initially disturbed by this outbreak, but fortunately, only three people were infected with SARS, and all of them overcame the disease. At the time, the Korean government measured body temperature for all passengers traveling from China to Korea from the beginning of the outbreak of SARS, and banned boarding for people with high body temperatures. As such, the Korean government implemented thorough quarantine measures to prevent the disease from spreading in the early stages. In addition, from this time on, Korea created the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in preparation for the outbreak of a large-scale infectious disease, which became the driving force that showed the effectiveness of the Korean quarantine system following the COVID-19 outbreak, which will be shown in the final section below.

the challenge in the real-time war against the virus

COVID-19

The last epidemic to talk about is COVID-19, which we are currently experiencing. COVID-19 is an infectious disease that was discovered in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and quickly spread all over the world during 2020. It is known that the coronavirus, which lives in the body of bats, was transmitted to humans. Symptoms are generally similar to those of SARS, but once caught, the infected person suffers from high fever, muscle pain all over the body, and even dies in severe case.
Since COVID-19 spreads through people’s saliva or runny nose, it can be prevented by washing hands frequently and wearing masks and efforts to develop vaccines are also being made worldwide. However, the many variation of the virus have made it difficult to develop vaccines. Vaccines developed by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are what everyone is talking about, but opinions are divided on the side effects or efficacy thereof. However, with the news of the effect of the vaccine and herd immunity, there are hopeful expectations of the end of COVID-19.

Over the past year, we have gone through so many changes and been terrified due to COVID-19. In addition, no country in the world has been free from the disease, making people even more afraid. However, after just one year, we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The epidemics mentioned earlier also seemed destined to destroy humankind, but we have a history of victory in ultimately overcoming them. One more line will hopefully soon be added to that history. Until then, I hope that we can all play our part in accelerating the victory by complying with thorough quarantine and preventive measures.