What I would really like to talk about in this essay is how different types of diseases can affect so many people and in so many ways, for good and bad. I think the biggest thing that we learned in this course, is that no matter the disease it can always be worsened by where it’s origins are and the conditions people are living in during the outbreak. There is also a lot to thank diseases for as well, because without some of them the world could be a much different place than it is today. I am going to draw from artifact 7 on the potato blight, artifact 6 on smallpox, artifact 10 on HIV, artifact 8 on Tuberculosis, and artifact 3 on Typhoid fever. With these 5 artifacts I can show that each of these diseases has affected populations and changed them, maybe for better or for worse.

I would like to start out with artifact 7 on the potato blight. Normally when you hear someone talking about a huge outbreak of a disease it is because it is affected the human population directly. Human beings are usually getting sick, dying, and spreading the disease to everyone in contact with them. What I really thought was fascinating about the potato blight though, was that the disease wasn’t even affecting the humans. It was a potato disease. The problem here though is that the Irish depended on the potatoes as their main source of food. This in turn made the potato blight one of the most deadly diseases in history when in didn’t even in fact attack the human population. While this famine in Ireland was absolutely awful, and millions of people lost their lives and their homesteads there was some good to take away from it. For instance the blight did help with bringing Irish immigrants to the “new world” where they would settle in New york, and on the Cape to name a few places. The great migration of Irish immigrants would bring lots of cheap labor to the states, and help with the building of the trans-continental railroad. This is not the only example of how a disease has helped to populate another area of the world though.

To add off of the potato blight, Tuberculosis was a very crucial disease in the migration of people to the western part of the United States. While the disease killed millions of people, and there was virtually no cure, many people believed that mountain air could cure their infected lungs (artifact 8). While there was a slim correlation to fresh air and losing symptoms there was a major population boom in the west due to this disease. There are obviously good and bad things that come with having millions of sick people migrating to new areas of a nation, obviously more people will get sick and need medical attention, but at the same time it helped to populate the west, and gain attention for the disease to help with research. In the United States today, the disease is nearly eradicated due to modern medicine. Small pox is another disease that I thought was fascinating to talk about. The virus has killed nearly 300,000,000 people worldwide (artifact 6), but today it has been eradicated in developed nations. Just like TB, there was no cure, but due to perseverance by the human race they finally cracked the code of the pox.

Tuberculosis and Smallpox are great examples of how diseases that seemed completely incurable was finally cracked, and now in modern countries we are given vaccines to prevent infection. I think both of these diseases are very good examples for the new seemingly incurable disease we are faced with today. Those suffering with HIV/AIDS today are all on borrowed time. These is no cure yet for what they are infected with, and with every passing day their condition gets worse. There are medications out there to try and slow down the spread of the disease throughout the body, but there is no cure or vaccine yet. While the disease is something very new to us still, and their seems to only be prevention methods at the moment, it is only a matter of time before the human brain prevails and HIV/AIDS is no longer a big deal. Unfortunately for those suffering from HIV there is a tremendous stigma that surrounds the entire disease. Those infected are automatically assumed to be performing in acts that are unacceptable to society such as drugs, or prostitution, or homosexual activities (artifact 10). While the disease is passed through bodily fluids as well as blood, there are a number of ways that it can be transmitted. In the 1980’s people needing blood transfusions were at a huge risk for contracting the disease. This was at a time when the stigma was at its highest that it was only a gay man’s disease. Because of these stigmas, the WHO and CDC have not been given the funding they require to find a cure. I think we can learn a lot from HIV across the globe. No matter who the disease affects we need to treat it as though it is affecting the entire middle class of America. That is the only way that there will ever be enough funding to cure these before they are out of hand. President Bush really started the change in the funding of HIV/AIDS research and care. When Bush gave his state of the union speech, he didn’t start off with talking about the war on terror, like expected. He started off by calling for 15 billion dollars in relief funding to those suffering from HIV as well as helping with the research for finding a cure. This was a monumental moment for the entire world. For the first time there seemed like hope that this illness could be stopped. I think the HIV virus was crucial in teaching us as a human beings that it doesn’t matter who is getting sick, it only matters that we make our best effort to find the cure before it gets to the level that HIV has gotten to.

The finally artifact I would like to talk about is artifact 3 on Typhoid fever. Typhoid fever like HIV was incredibly stigmatized. While HIV has been seen as a homosexual diseases Typhoid fever was seen as the poor immigrant disease. So it was incredibly shocking back then, to find out that many wealthy homeowners in New York were getting the fever and dying. This was probably one of the first cases where the stigma really didn’t fit the disease. In previous diseases before this there were really no developed nations that could fight diseases anyways so most everyone was affected the same. This was the case with Small pox in Europe for centuries as well as the plague and others. What was so interesting about Typhoid though were the ethical issues that were brought up with the disease. Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary, was effectively isolated from society when it was discovered that she was the cause of the Typhoid outbreak in the wealthy society. There was a major case on whether it was ethical or not for her to be segregated from society in this way because there was really nothing she could do about the fact that she was immune to the symptoms of the disease. While she spent most of her life in the medical facility off the coast of New York, New York, she was the reason why the laws were eventually changed on how states deal with carriers of diseases. We can thank her for that, at least.

I really enjoyed my time in this class. I thought that it was very interesting to learn about how diseases were spread as well as the social an ethical issues that were brought up with each new disease. I was very unaware of just how much we are affected by diseases that may or may not even attack us directly. Hopefully we can learn from our mistake on certain diseases and begin to catch up to ever-changing bacteria and viral infections. Who knows, maybe one day we will be developing vaccines for diseases that don’t even exist yet.