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symptoms of bubonic plague . Most GPs have never seen it . They ’ re not even sure what they ’ re dealing with .
History repeating
A brief history of pandemics and how we ’ ve dealt with them .
Peter Curson interviewed by Conor Burke
This is not the first time that
a pandemic has ravaged a society , and starting with the first recorded pandemic in Athens , during the Peloponnesian War , nearly every generation has had to deal with a deadly disease .
Professor Peter Curson is emeritus professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population at Macquarie University and the author of Deadly Encounters : How Infectious Disease Helped Shape Australia . He joined Campus Review to talk about the history of pandemics .
CR : About how many pandemics have hit humans throughout history ? PC : In Australia alone , we ’ ve had at least 20 . I would say in the world , over the last few hundred years , there ’ ve been probably at least a couple of hundred . And pandemics have become a major feature of human life .
Which of these events really stand out for you ? Well , the Black Death of course . It ’ s said to be one of the most significant outbreaks of a pandemic . But more recently , the smallpox outbreaks in the 19th and 20th century probably killed about 400 million people . And we know of course , flu alone in 1918 / 19 killed probably 60 or 70 million people around the world . But there ’ s a long history of such things .
The last major outbreak of the bubonic plague , which spread out of China in the 1880s and reached Australia in 1900 , probably killed 40 or 50 million people and hung on until the 1930s .
What is it about the plague then , that makes it such a hardy virus ? Basically , we ’ re confronted by the microbial world , but we tend to believe that we are the dominant species in the world and we can control everything . Nothing could be further from the truth . The major feature of our world is that the microbial world dominates . They have the ability to change , mutate , retreat into its zoonotic environment . Many of them are nurtured among animals , where they go back to before emerging again .
We think that the bubonic plague has disappeared from the world . Today , plague is more geographically widespread than at any time in human history . In Los Angeles and San Francisco , probably 20 to 30 people every year present with the
Have we , as a species , developed some antibodies to the plague ? Yes , we have . We have a vaccine and the antibodies , but it certainly hasn ’ t removed the threat of bubonic plague . And we still , honestly believe that we have moved into a post-infectious disease era . Again , nothing could be further from the truth . In our battle against major infections we ’ ve only really won one outbreak , and that was smallpox , which has largely now disappeared from the world .
Take polio , for example . We believed the vaccines that were developed in the mid-1950s would see the disappearance of polio , but a new variant has emerged over the last few years .
Can you paint a picture of Australia in 1918 , when the Spanish Flu hit ? There was an earlier pandemic of flu in 1890 / 91 in Australia . One of the things we face when we ’ re looking at infectious disease is we tend to forget what happened in the past . We tend to forget the lessons we ’ ve learned , and we tend to recreate the same defence measures that we ’ ve used for centuries .
At least 800,000 Australians caught flu in 1890 / 91 : 25 per cent of the Australian population . There weren ’ t that many deaths , about 3000 . But even so , we ’ ve forgotten about that .
If you move on to the 1919 flu pandemic , that outbreak produced about 1.8 million cases of flu in 1919 – 30 per cent of the population – and there were probably about 15,000 deaths . It was probably one of the greatest outbreaks in Australian experience .
Basically , pandemics like we ’ re suffering at the moment come in a wave form , reach a peak , and then gradually decline . Occasionally , there ’ s a second wave . Not always . Certainly , in the 1919 influenza , there were two major waves . The second one was more severe than the first . We have yet to see whether we ’ re going to experience that with coronavirus .
How did they deal with telling people to wash their hands and stay indoors in 1918 ? The first efforts to understand and control the outbreaks of infectious disease probably occurred in Sydney in the 1870s when there
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