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How Our Modern World Creates Outbreaks Like Coronavirus
The interior of "Wuhan Livingroom", which is converted into a hospital to receive patients infected with the novel coronavirus, in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, on Feb. 4, 2020.
Cai Yang—Xinhua/Polaris
IDEAS
BY MARK HONIGSBAUM
FEBRUARY 7, 2020
Honigsbaum is a medical historian and the author of The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris.
“Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” observes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague. “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people by surprise.”
Camus was imagining a fictional outbreak of plague in 1948 in Oran, a port city in northwest Algeria. But at a time when the world is reeling from a very real microbial emergency sparked by the emergence of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, central China, his observations are as pertinent as ever.
Like the global emergency over Zika in 2015, or the emergency over the devastating West African Ebola outbreak the year before – or the global panic sparked by SARS (another coronavirus) in 2002-2003, the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic has once again wrong-footed medical experts and taken the world by surprise.
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Whether the Wuhan outbreak turns out to be a mild pandemic like the 2009 swine flu, or a more severe one like the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide, at present no one can say.
But if a century of pandemic responses has taught us anything, it is that while we may have gotten better at monitoring pandemic threats in what used to be called the “blank spaces” on the map, we also have a tendency to forget the lessons of medical history.
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The first of these is that epidemics of emerging infectious diseases appear to be accelerating. In the 19th century it took several years for cholera and plague to spread from their endemic centers in India and China to Europe and North America following the trade routes plied by caravans, horses and sail ships.
That all changed with the advent of steam travel and the expansion of the European railway network. For instance, it was a steam ship, sailing from Japan via Honolulu, that most likely brought rats infected with plague to San Francisco in 1900. And ten years earlier, it was steam trains that spread the so-called “Russian” influenza throughout Europe. The result was that within four months of the first report of an outbreak in St Petersburg in December 1889, the Russian flu had been introduced to Berlin and Hamburg, from where it was carried by ocean-going liners to Liverpool, Boston and Buenos Aires.
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