Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom Nick; Cirkovic Milan M.; Rees Martin J. & Milan M. Ćirković

Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom Nick; Cirkovic Milan M.; Rees Martin J. & Milan M. Ćirković

Author:Bostrom, Nick; Cirkovic, Milan M.; Rees, Martin J. & Milan M. Ćirković
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-04-14T16:00:00+00:00


• 14 •

Plagues and pandemics: past, present, and future

Edwin Dennis Kilbourne

14.1 Introduction

This chapter is about pandemics, a somewhat ambiguous term, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a disease prevalent throughout a country, a continent, or the world’. In present modern usage the term takes greater cognizance of its original Greek derivation and is largely restricted to global prevalence (pan demos) – all people. The same source tells us that plague has a broader meaning, implying a sudden unexpected event that is not necessarily a disease, but introducing the concept of acute, lethal, and sudden danger-characteristics that are connoted but not specifically denoted by the term ‘pandemic’.

It will become apparent that glimpses of the future must consider the emergence of new pathogens, the re-emergence of old ones, the anthropogenic fabrication of novel agents, and changes in the environment and in human behaviour. In other words ‘the problem’ in addressing infectious disease threats is not one but many separable problems, each of which must be isolated in traditional scientific fashion and separately evaluated as components of what I like to call ‘holistic epidemiology’. This emerging discipline comprises microbial and human genetics, human behaviour, global ecology, toxicology, and environmental change.



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