Over 200 years ago, a French Jesuit missionary wrote an essay criticising China’s handling of smallpox. The reality, though, was China was light years ahead of the world in confronting the disease.
Aboriginal men on Dorre Island, WA.
State Library of Western Australia
Aboriginal communities have a long history of fighting off disease outbreaks – and self-determination is vital to their success.
Members of the Maryland Air National Guard arrange medical supplies for shipment from the Strategic National Stockpile.
Master Sgt. Christopher Schepers/Maryland Air National Guard
Andrew Lakoff, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The paradox of the stockpile is that it’s meant to protect against future threats, but is limited by today’s imagination about what those threats might be.
President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the press briefing room at the White House on March 15, 2020.
Getty/Tasos Katopodis
Usually when a leader handles a crisis poorly, it’s politically costly. But President Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis is not likely to hurt him, says an expert on health crises.
Coronavirus has necessitated a global public health response. But what does ‘public health’ actually mean? Three key examples give us an idea of what public health looks like in action.
Vaccines were an effective way of protecting against the deadly disease.
CDC/ Wikimedia Commons
Smallpox is the only disease to be eradicated through sustained human effort. Many of these volunteers were women who defied social norms to save lives in India.
Hospital workers wearing biohazard suits scrub down a man in a decontamination drill.
AP Photo/Nati Harnik
Talk of bioterrorism might provoke fears of smallpox and anthrax, but mundane threats like salmonella may pose greater danger. And experts say that the U.S. is not prepared for an attack.
Industrial vaccine production has enabled mass vaccination campaigns that have reduced infectious diseases.
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Hernán Cortés owed his conquest of the Aztecs to his expedition’s unknown, unseen secret weapon: the smallpox virus. Disease epidemics can set the course of human history.
Nigerian children receiving the polio vaccine in Lagos.
EPA
Melinda Suchard, National Institute for Communicable Diseases
The global target to eradicate polio is being missed because a number of countries are struggling to reach high vaccine coverage.
In this April 14, 1947 file photo, a long line winds toward the entrance to Morrisania Hospital in the Bronx borough of New York, where doctors were vaccinating against smallpox. In an attempt to halt the spread of the disease, officials said city residents were being vaccinated at the rate of eight a minute.
(AP Photo/File)
Humans have shown that together we can overcome daunting problems, including deadly pathogens like smallpox. It is a lesson of international cooperation and respect that we should pay attention to.
The Monkeypox virus was isolated most recently in 2012 from a dead infant mangabey (species of monkey) in Ivory Coast.
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A disease suspected to be monkeypox is on the rampage in Nigeria. In less than one month, it has spread to seven of the country’s 36 states and infected 31 people.
The Bubonic plague slowed urbanisation, industrial development and economic growth in Europe for many years.
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Despite being so small they can’t be seen with the naked eye, pathogens that cause human disease have greatly affected the way humans live for centuries.
Spanish flu killed more people than the Great War that preceded it. And tuberculosis even more than that.
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