Mad about Science: Pandemics

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

If you can read this, congratulations! You experienced a global pandemic that began in December 2019. Up until that point, the most recent pandemic the world had endured was the HIV/AIDS pandemic that began in 1976 but hit its peak around 2005. Unlike COVID-19, HIV was spread exclusively through contact with infected blood and bodily fluids, primarily through sex and communal drug use.

The estimated death toll of COVID-19 to date is somewhere around 7.1 million, according to the World Health Organization; though, due to myriad global issues ranging from political misinformation to the massive supply chain disruptions of the pandemic, that number could well be higher. The estimated death toll from AIDS and AIDS-related illnesses is around 44.1 million over the past 50 years, UNAIDS reported.

Today, we will be looking at a few other pandemics that struck the globe (or the places on it that were recording them at the time). We will be including an estimated population in addition to the death toll, to give a proper perspective of the lethality of these specific diseases.

Influenza, 1918. World Population: 1.8 billion. Death toll: 20-50 million.

The most lethal strain of influenza in recorded history struck the world in 1918. It earned the moniker “the Spanish Flu” after a newspaper in Madrid first began reporting on the disease. Other nations had largely suppressed information of the flu strain during the end of World War I, but not by neutral Spain. Despite the disease not originating on the Iberian Peninsula, its name carried a heavy weight that transcended borders. The U.S. and Germany both saw a rise in xenophobia related to the flu, particularly in areas that were hard hit by the disease.

Another name given to this disease was “the Purple Death,” due to its mechanism for suffocating its victims and causing them to turn a bluish-purple as their lungs filled with fluid. Unique to this strain of flu, it disproportionately affected young and healthy adults when past strains had primarily reaped the young and the elderly.

Interestingly, similar to COVID-19, the Purple Death variant activated something called cytokine storms, where the immune system overreacted to the disease and laid waste to healthy tissue in a dire bid to eradicate the infection. This led to inflammation and fluid in the lungs that would effectively suffocate the afflicted individual over the course of a few hours.

The Justinian Plague, 541 C.E. World population: ~200 million. Death toll: 25 million.

The first recorded instance of the bubonic plague was Justinian’s plague, which wiped out as much as half of Europe’s total population. A variant of this plague would resurface in 1346 and earn the moniker of the Black Death, which wiped out as much as half the human population of Europe, Asia and Africa.

While Justinian’s plague may not have been quite as numerically lethal as the Black Death, it struck the highest population concentration in Europe and Asia at the time, the city of Constantinople — a city that had been considered impregnable by any army but uniquely vulnerable to a disease of this nature.

The bubonic plague spreads through the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which lives in the gut of fleas. These fleas would drink the blood of humans and rats, spreading the bacteria in the process. This created a vicious cycle in dense populations like Constantinople, where the death toll reached as high as 5,000 people a day.

Justinian’s plague had far-reaching consequences for the Byzantine Empire. More than just killing millions, it caused massive economic ripples by crippling trade, triggering famine, decimating the military and critically damaging Emperor Justinian’s ability to rule. By many accounts, 541 C.E. was considered the worst year to live in recorded history.

Antonine plague, 165 C.E. World population: ~200 million. Death toll ~10 million.

Traveling back nearly two millennia, our understanding of disease begins to break down. The Antonine plague is a bit of a mystery, with historians speculating it may have been a smallpox outbreak that ended up becoming a full-blown pandemic. 

It was brought back to Rome by soldiers who had been fighting in the Roman-Parthian war in Mesopotamia. The war was part of a conflict that lasted for 270 years, though this was actually part of a much larger series of massive conflicts between the Roman and Persian empires that went on for 684 years.

The plague was detailed by Galen of Pergamon, a Roman and Greek physician who studied the effects of the disease on the Roman population. Among the symptoms were sore throat, diarrhea and pustules that ran down victims’ backs — a trait that led historians to believe this was an early outbreak of smallpox.

Rome was so heavily affected by the disease that Emperor Marcus Aurelius was forced to recruit new soldiers from “undesirable” stock such as captured bandits, slaves and gladiators ahead of his incursions into Gaul.

In Ridley Scott’s historical fiction epic Gladiator, starring Russel Crowe, this campaign is referenced at the beginning of the movie. Though the plague isn’t referenced in the movie, it would have waned during the period the film was taking place.

Stay curious, 7B.