Hayden Gann

Eileen Hinks

BI-245X-01

24JUL2018

Reflective Essay

In this course, there has been a large amount taught about how endemics, epidemics, and pandemics work and start. We learned how society feared and panicked over diseases throughout the ages and caused many people to become sick or even die. These diseases have shaped human history in many ways shapes and forms.

In history, epidemics have shaped the way society is as a whole. An example of this can easily be seen with the Black Death. This disease alone killed nearly one in four people in the pandemic of the 14^th century. This led to better studies of medicine and the removal of old ideas. This would also happen later with diseases like smallpox, the first virus to get a vaccine for it. Another disease that shaped society as we know it today is the Irish potato blight. This helped to shape the modern United States as we know it by creating a mass migration from Ireland to the United States due to the famine. In today’s society, we can see what these terrible diseases have left behind all around us, whether people realize it or not. Today, however, we have mostly beaten back many diseases that caused death on large scales including the Black Death, Smallpox, Yellow Fever, and several other diseases. Though this may be the case, there are still many diseases that can create horrible pandemics, such as Ebola, SARS, and several other diseases. For these viruses and bacterial infections, there is a much easier chance to spread and live due to how today’s society operates. With global forms of transportation such as boats and planes, diseases have a much easier time spreading and infecting people. An example of this would be the Ebola virus in 2017 when a diplomat from the U.S. got the virus and traveled on a plane. Thankfully no one caught the horrible virus, but there was still that threat.

In this course, there have been many things I have learned and been curious about. While completing different artifacts, I learned quite a bit of information I found very interesting and useful. The first artifact that comes to mind for me in the tuberculosis artifact, or artifact six. The reason this artifact intrigued me was that of my father. He has Krones disease and takes immunosuppressant drugs which leaves him open to tuberculosis, and it kind of gave me comfort about learning how it was spread and how treatments can work. Learning about MDR, multi-drug resistant, and XDR, extensively-drug-resistant tuberculosis gave me a little hope since even patients with HIV can survive this infection.  In artifact six, I even mentioned that new antibiotics were created in the 1940’s and 50’s to help treat this infection. The next artifact that truly intrigued me was the artifact on the Bubonic Plague and learning more about this topic. I absolutely love history, and almost tried to minor in it. This disease was one that influenced history greatly, not only in its art but in the medical field and many other places. To actually learn in depth what it was like rather than just have it quickly mentioned in history class was a nice change of pace. Just learning why it was called the Bubonic plague was interesting to me. I also mentioned in my artifact how it was curious how this disease kept appearing time and time again, all be it different degrees of severity, but how it survived for so long. The fact that it is even still around today just blows my mind. Though luckily if we do one day run into this nasty virus again, we will easily be able to stop it with antibiotics.

            This class has been rather enjoyable just being able to look at these different diseases and just how they affected our society on so many levels. I will be able to take these things I have learned in class and not only apply them to a historical background, but also to my future studies as a biology major, and I think this will do wonders for me down the road. After the Army, I would like to become a field biologist specializing in vertebrate mammals such as bats, and this may be able to further our understanding of these diseases as a whole, and I am greatly looking forward to using what I learned in this class.

Help Received:

Articles 2 and 6

In class lectures

Thomas Hayden Gann

In the 20th and 21st centuries, zoonotic diseases have started to become more prevalent in humans. A zoonotic infection is a virus that was originally in an animal that is transmitted to a human via ingestion or contact. There are many factors that could influence this. One of the factors is processed meats that come from on knowingly infected livestock. Another factor is the fact of deforestation and this driving animals and bacteria/viruses we have never seen before. In recent years, this would include the Ebola virus and the Zika virus just to name a few. These viruses can be called a spillover in viral infections and make humans very sick or even kill them.

With the close contact and massive food industries now, there is a much greater risk for obtaining these diseases. Scientists still don’t entirely know how these viruses were able to mutate and gain human hosts, but are working hard to figure it out. Until a day comes where we truly understand viruses, all we can do is fight back and pray for the best outcome.

In the 1980’s in the U.S., a new virus began to spread, and no one had any idea what it was. This virus was later discovered to be what we know today as HIV and AIDS. This virus is primarily passed on through sexual intercourse and was very prevalent in the MSM community. The disease was at first only believed to be transmitted through intercourse between two gay men, and usually the receiver of the act. This was the belief until straight males and females started to contract the virus. After this was discovered, it was also discovered that babies were getting this virus congenitally.

To stop the spread of this virus, several things were put in place. The first thing was the more ready and availability to get obtain contraception before sex. Education on the topic was also spread all over the use to lower the infection rate of this disease in the U.S. In most of the world, especially in third world countries, this disease is still spreading rapidly.  To help slow the rate of this disease in places like Africa, contraception is handed out, and education is still attempted. This has slowed the spread of HIV and AIDS, but it is still a major problem in these countries.

HIV and AIDS are a horrible virus that makes the victim suffer over a long period of time, until their eventual early death. There have been many drugs put into place to help prolong life for these victims, but this life comes at a cost. The cure for this disease will come one day, and the eventual eradication of this disease will follow suit. Far too many people have already lost their battle with HIV due to other viruses a shortened lifespan.

Cholera is a disgusting virus that attacks the digestive system of a human. It more or less stops the solidification process of waste in the intestine system. This bacteria also doesn’t let human beings keep any liquids it needs to stay hydrated in their body. Without treatment, someone can die within one to two day. One of the main ways this virus spreads is through water contamination. In many third world countries. this is a problem. People not having running water toilets to move waste and defecate in the river which spreads the disease when people get water, and people not washing their hands before a meal can also spread the disease to food. This led to the widespread outbreak of cholera in places like India.

After an outbreak or two, scientists started realizing this disease was being caused by germ theory, something Robert Koch had thought of around the third outbreak of cholera. This allowed them to think up a plan to use things like chlorine and other substances to clean water, and built toilets far away from rivers and other sources of water. This helped to slow the spread of cholera significantly. Scientists also found the best way to help treat this disease was through oral tablets designed to quickly rehydrate someone, and this stopped cholera from killing its victims.

Today, there are still places where cholera outbreaks happen, but it is less common than ever before, however, there is still one endemic case in Haiti. Several factors like the major earthquake which destroyed the little infrastructure Haiti had, led to the spread of the disease due to things like lack or toilets and a lack of running water to wash someone’s hands. Today, there are still thousands of cases a month of cholera in Haiti, and though numbers have decreased, it still seems to be relatively endemic in this country.

Works Cited:

-Weppelmann, Alex, et al. “Has Haiti’s Cholera Epidemic Become a Permanent Problem?” The Conversation, The Conversation, 23 July 2018, theconversation.com/has-haitis-cholera-epidemic-become-a-permanent-problem-55790.

Help received: Work Cited

Tuberculosis has been around for hundreds of years and has killed millions of people worldwide. This disease is extremely contagious and can be transmitted with a simple cough. The disease has three different forms, and these are the basic form, MDR, and XDR. These are the types of resistance that tuberculosis has to the drugs taken to combat it. MDR, or Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, is very hard to treat but is survivable. XDR, or extensively-drug-resistant tuberculosis, is next to impossible to cure. The only way to even treat the resistant strain of tuberculosis is with toxic drugs that severely weaken a person body.

In the 1900’s with the max influx of immigrants to the United States, this disease was a real problem. Its highly contagious nature could very well lead it to epidemic levels if not treated with care. This continued to be an extreme fear all the way up until the 1940’s where a new antibiotic was discovered that helped to treat this disease. For a few decades, the disease was more or less halted in its tracks, but a new disease called H.I.V. or the Human Immun0deficiency Virus helped this extremely contagious drug to once again spread.

After many years of being subjected to antibiotics, tuberculosis eventually managed to mutate into the forms that we see today such as MDR and XDR. This bacterial infection was able to mutate and run by Darwin’s laws of Natural Selection, being that these bacteria were able to survive these antibiotics. This continued to happen until these new strains were born and continue to kill people to this day. Hundreds of people die every day due to this disease, and hopefully one day we can find a drug or a cure for this infection and wipe it off the face of the planet.

The potato is a large part of Western diets and can go with almost every meal. A human can live off of almost just potatoes alone due to it high carbohydrate load and other vitamins that humans need. This was partially what played into the high impact of the Irish potato famine. The Irish lived almost entirely potatoes due to the fact that was one of the few things that would grow in the harsh environment of Ireland. When the potato famine hit Ireland, it was from a natural virus that affects plants and mutated to attack potatoes which stopped them from being able to grow. This left Ireland with little to no large source of food.

When the potato famine struck Ireland, the main source of food was decimated, and people quickly started to starve to death. This lead to a wide scale panic throughout Ireland in the early 1900’s. Many people just packed up and left, and many migrated to the United States. Those that couldn’t leave were struck with famine, and many people were left to forage for themselves just to survive. This problem was only fixed by genetic modification of the plant to be more resistant to this virus, which allowed potatoes to once again strive in the climate of Ireland.

The ability, and technology to genetically modify plants has helped to different species of plants to new areas they couldn’t grow before and make these plants more resistant to disease. This has effectively stopped the possibility for another potato famine to cause chaos and death like it did a century ago. This relatively new ability has also led to the creation of completely new species of plants like the Carolina Blue Reaper pepper, the hottest pepper in the world. This has more or less opened up so many doors for scientists to explore.

Smallpox, a deadly disease that plagued the world for centuries. It was a disease that anyone could get, and it killed millions of people. When it was first introduced to South America, it killed an estimated ninety percent of the indigenous population. Because of this extremely high mortality rate, everyone tried to find a cure. These cures included heat treatment, where the victim would be placed under a blanket and trapped in a room with a fire on. This was thought to kill the virus inside the body, but honestly only made the victim dehydrated, and even sicker. Another odd treatment was the red treatment. I person was placed in an all red room and told to wear all red clothing, this treatment, of course, didn’t work.

Around the 19th century, there was a breakthrough in medicine and a treatment for smallpox. A doctor named Eric Jenner had heard about the milk maids odd habit of not getting the smallpox disease because they had been exposed to cowpox, a much less deadly disease. He tested a theory of infecting an eight-year-old boy with cowpox and then infecting him with smallpox. This boy not only didn’t die, he only had a very slight reaction to this deadly disease. This miracle was then repeated time and time again, eventually spreading all over Europe, and helped many peoples survive this terrible disease. This dropped the death rate from smallpox from double digits to only one percent.

There were so many pros to this new treatment, though many people were still scared of it. There were many people who were reluctant to get this treatment, but most people eventually came to see that it worked. Over time treatment got better and better, and the World Health Organization and CDC got together and eventually tried to eradicate this disease. The used a method called surveillance and containment, which was where only the infected people were vaccinated, and the WOH would keep an eye out for anyone else to get the virus. This eventually led to the complete eradication of the disease by 1980, and the world has been free of smallpox minus lab samples ever since.

The disease syphilis has been around for centuries and is a terrible virus that can deteriorate skin cell, make people blind, and worst of all crazy. In recent years, the disease has become treatable with common antibiotics such as penicillin. However, with things like infectious diseases, there is always a debate involved with them. In the case of syphilis, it was who was to be treated and who was not. This disease had plagued society since the Columbian exchange, and when it was originally contracted by Europeans, it would kill them within weeks. This was a terrible disease and didn’t discriminate who it attacked or who got it. It could be spread to newborn infants with contact with the bacteria through vaginal births, and could easily be passed on through any sexual contact.

In the nineteen thirties there was a study started call the Tuskegee study of syphilis, and took poor black men who had contracted syphilis to study the effects of syphilis on the human body. The patients were told that they were being treated for “bad blood” when they were really just being experimented on to see the effects. This horrible unethical disease study lasted all the way up to the seventies, which is the most messed up part. This study could have been ended very quickly with penicillin but was continued and played with these men’s lives with very little compensation in the end. The doctors that performed these experiments justified them by saying it would help many people, in the long run, discover that they had contracted syphilis. The question is, how many people could have been saved if these men had just treated their patients like they said they would.

With this study being performed the way it was, it caused a lot of distrust among minorities all over the U.S. when it came to getting any kind of treatment from physicians. This is still true today due to how common knowledge this study is in the United States. One example of this was when a case of TB broke out in Alabama in a small black population, almost no one trusted the doctors in the area to treat it, and the outbreak ended up making it to next to epidemic levels. Trust levels have gotten better in the area since then, but overall is still not great. In my honest opinion, I can’t blame them, especially the minorities.

When the Black Death started to spread +in the 14th century it started in the Mongolian Empire and managed to work its way all the way to western Europe. The Silk Road help to spread this disease rather rapidly for the time period. The Silk Road also led to sea trading routes and passed this disease through ships crew. When this disease arrived where it was going, it started killing off peoples left and right. It caused large swollen buboes (lymph nodes), and a lack of circulation within extremities which caused them to start rotting them away. With the disease also coming into families, it spread very quickly within small towns, or even in large cities. This disease did not discriminate between anyone and started it vast killing spree.

When this disease arrived, doctors didn’t have any idea what was the cause of this disease, and looked at the alignment of planets, and believed it was a miasma that was infecting people, and no one had a cure. Doctors started to look at symptoms and try to record things like death rates, and other treatments that might help the afflicted. This would later help all over the world for diagnosing this terrible disease, and for later generations to help kill it off. The regular population, on the other hand, blamed many things such as sin,  the Jewish peoples, and many other things. Jewish people were burned at the stake and radical Christian cults were started to try and repent for their issues. No matter what happened these things could not fix what was happening, and the world began to almost fall apart. This happened socially, and economically throughout the world, especially in Europe.

In the modern area, the Bubonic plague has been all but exterminated. Most cases are still seen in Madagascar due to people eating dead animals, mainly rodents, they found in the woods, otherwise known as bushmeat. This also happened in Madagascar due to a burial practice that takes place, where dead bodies are dug back up, and their skulls placed on the ground for consultation, and questioning. This has led to an outbreak of this disease to happen. Throughout the rest of the world, there are very few other cases. Though some will spike up every once in a while, like in the U.S., when a man found a decaying rat under his porch and picked it up. This transmitted this disease to the man and ended up killing around ten people. The problem was eventually figured out, but not in time to save these people. This is honestly a terrible disease that was rightfully eradicated.

Help Reviewed: Class lectures, and the movie watched in class.

The appearance of the Black Death, or Yersinia Pestis, wasn’t really seen until relatively recently in human history. Early humans were mainly hunter-gatherers and didn’t stay in one location for too long. Because of this humans didn’t have time to wallow in filth or fecal matter. With this being the case, the population was generally smaller and people were relatively scattered. Humans were to smaller in number to carry widespread disease, and the most common ailments were parasites like worms that infected the body. With the relatively recent discovery of agriculture, humans began to start staying in one place rather than moving around. This was the first time really that people could start having larger populations, and thus the ability to start spreading diseases that could move from human to human. This was more or less the same for zoonotic diseases that spread with the domestication of animals.

With the growth of civilizations around the world came a growth of filth and the concern of what to do with fecal matter, this started to get large amounts of people sick. This was the kick off for deadly diseases like the Justinian Plague, the black death, and the final outbreak in the 19th century. This had a wide reaching affect as well due to communication between different civilizations through trade, and through diplomatic meetings for land. This is how the black death spread from Asia all the way to Western Europe. Though for the most part, even with civilizations around, these disease were relatively common bacteria around the world, just certain triggers are what set them off in the end, such as climate change, causing mass death like the black death.

In todays world, new diseases and plagues can cause a massive problem with todays society. The advent of quick travel methods such as public transpertation and air travel, diseases can spread much faster over a much wider area. An example of this was an outbreak of SARS in 2003 in Hong Kong that infected hundreds of people in mulitple countries due to air travel. Thing like hand shakes and other cultural customs can also lead to the wide spread of diseases. In other words, even with the extreme medical advances that have occured within the last century, if a new form of the Black Death, or a new deadly disease that has never been seen before, it can cause havoc on a massive scale.

Help Recieved: Class lectures, Chapter 1 powerpoint

Thomas Hayden Gann