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.

Historical Focus:

HIV has been one of the most devastating diseases that the world has ever known. This hasn’t been by the millions and millions of people that have lost their lives to it, or by the hundreds of years that it has been around either. The disease is fairly new but due to the time period of when it arose and those that are affected it has become one of the most stigmatized diseases in human history. The problem with HIV is that it is a virus that is transmitted through the blood. The main ways that blood is swapped from person to person is through sexual intercourse or by sharing needles with drugs. Because of these two forms of transmission this disease has become the disease that nobody wants to talk about, especially political leaders or those in power. Due to the time period when the disease arose too has made it especially easy for word to get out about what

HIV originated in the congo basin of Africa as a form of chimpanzee virus. The way that it spread to humans was through years and years of contact with nomads that would hunt these chimpanzees and in the process of killing them would accidentally get contaminated. The original form of the virus was not actually that bad, but the one thing that HIV does a really good job of is mutating. Scientists now believe that through years and years of contact with the virus it finally mutated into something strong enough that the human immune system could not fight it, and actually was extremely weakened by the disease. It is thought that the disease mutated in one chimpanzee in Africa and that single mutation was passed onto a human that eventually killed the chimp. Around this time Africa was being urbanized and large cities were sprouting up. This made it increasingly hard for the tribes to continue to survive on their own. Many men stopped hunting and went into the cities to work. Those infected with the new HIV virus spread that to the big cities and from there it exploded into what it is today.

Socially this disease has the worst stigma’s on it. It it thought to be the disease of druggies and gay’s. This is all due to one report int he 1980’s in the US that was completely false. The disease actually does not care who it infects. In fact, one African country reported just as many female cases of HIV as it did male cases. The stigma that it is only gay men that get the disease came from the United States because those were the first cases that were seen here. It is very easy for the disease to be spread from unprotected sex.

Unfortunately there have been very few efforts to really get the disease under control in the world. It is very hard for political figures to bring up the fight against HIV/AIDS because of the population that is infected. There have been some attempts though, to start a global effort for HIV. For example, President Bush in his state of the union speech didn’t start off by giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, like he was expected to. Instead he started off his address to Congress by calling for 15 billion dollars in HIV/AIDS funding that would be spent on drugs and research. This was by far the biggest step forward in the fight against HIV because as stated in the video it brought the talk from millions to billions of dollars for the fight. Finally HIV was on the national stage.

Cholera is caused by contaminated water, and is very easily spread throughout the water supply. The disease is extremely deadly and so severe that victims could die of dehydration within 24 hours of transmission. Cholera usually rises to epidemic proportions in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (India and Bangladesh). There has been seven pandemics of Cholera in the past two hundred years.

The disease is caused by the Vibrio cholerae, which is a gram-negative comma-shaped bacillus. There are more than 200 different types of V. cholerae, and only two are known to be pathogenic to humans. Early documentation of the disease has been clearly shown as early as the 16th century in India, but there were also reports of a disease resembling it as far back as 400 BCE.

As stated above the disease is very easy to transmit because it is a waterborne bacteria. The disease is mainly transmitted through water that has fecal matter in it. Because of this, anywhere that doesn’t have clean, treated water is susceptible to the cholera bacteria. Over the past two centuries there have been seven major pandemics of cholera throughout the world. All of these pandemics have come from poor areas of the world or poor parts of cities which is why it is associated with poverty and certain communities of poor people, for example the Irish.

There were many factors that led to the bacteria not spreading to developed countries. One of the factors was that there was just an overall better understanding of disease, and bacteria. People in developed countries were much more careful about what they touched or ate for fear of being infected. One scientist that started to help the world gain an understanding was Dr. John Snow. In 1854 he studied cholera transmission during an outbreak close to his home in the Soho district of London. Snow was the first person to say that cholera was not transmitted by miasma’s but by water related contamination. One thing that helped Snow gain recognition for the germ theory was when Henry Whitehead, who had been a supporter of the miasma theory, backed Snow’s conclusion of how cholera was actually spread. Because of Snow, science, cities, and the modern world were changed. Another notable researcher of the cholera bacteria was Filippo Pacini. Pacini was an Italia researcher who found the cholera bacteria at the same time the Snow did, but his work did not gain prominence until 82 years after his death.

Finally Robert Koch came along. Koch was able to find and observe the bacteria causing cholera at the same time the all the other researchers where looking for it. While every other scientist was trying to fight those believing in miasma’s Koch was able to identify the bacteria and name it, Vibrio Cholerae. In 1905 Koch received the Nobel Prize for medicine. He studied dead bodies that had died of cholera disease in Egypt in 1883. he reasoned that bacteria was the main cause of disease.

The major impact or effect that cholera has had on the world is that today there is a much greater stress on having clean water. The disease is the poor persons disease in that it is not found in developed countries. There is very little worry from normal american’s that what they are drinking or the food that they are eating is going to give them severe diarrhea or major dehydration. The major thing that cholera did for the world though, was it brought about the idea of germ theory. It took the work of many scientists to finally beat the idea that diseases were caused by miasma’s, but with the discovery of the bacteria that caused cholera there was a much greater understanding of what bacteria is and how it can negatively affect you. This is one if the main reasons why Bear Grylls and other survivalists state that you must boil your water before you drink it, if it comes from the ground. Because boiling the water will kill any parasites or bacteria that may be hiding in it.

Tuberculosis has plagued the World for many centuries. In the beginning the disease had no bias. Everyone was infected equally and everyone died equally. This was mainly because there was no cure whatsoever. The disease seemingly ate you from the inside out. Those that were infected would continually lose weight, eventually TB would completely consume you and you would die.

While TB was a very terrible disease it did help to settle the western world. Because of the horrible cough it was thought that better air quality could help your lungs recover. There was promise that moving west and into the mountains in places such as Colorado could have a beneficial effect on your health. Many cities sprang up because of this including Denver and Los Angeles. Unfortunately this theory of better air quality was mostly just a myth and some people got even sicker. Another issue with infected people moving west was that there were hundreds of thousands of sick individuals moving into large cities out west and infecting others.

In the U.S. there were many ways that people tried to ward off infection. For instance there was a major change in appearance and clothing during the early 1900’s. Women’s skirts got shorter to avoid getting in the mud, men got rid of their beards as to cut down on potentially carrying germs in the hair and infecting family members, and there were many parks and playgrounds built to get people to go outside and get fresh air. There was also a major improvement in personal hygiene during this period.

Not only did people’s clothing change but around this time was when many people began to add porches and decks to their houses. Due to how crowded sanatoriums were many people were forced to stay home to get better. There was a need to be outside just like you would be at a sanatorium so they built a deck or a porch. This has changed how we live today because almost every middle class american and up has a deck or porch of some sort.

In wealthy parts of the World today it is very easy to get drugs for TB. It has almost been completely eradicated in the United States and other first world countries because of the advances that have been made in medicine, but it is still a huge issue in third world countries like we saw in the video on Friday. In Swaziland, Africa for instance TB is one of he main causes of death. There is no great treatment here for the infected and many are taken from their homes to go live in hospitals for years to try and get well. The main problem in countries like this is the prevalence of HIV as well as TB. Because many people’s immune systems are already very weak due to HIV they are more susceptible of getting TB, and more likely to die from it because their body can’t fend off the disease. In these places the drugs that are used to fight TB are so poisonous to your body that many people cannot keep them down, there are suicides, as well as many others who refuse treatment because it is so horrific. In these parts of the world TB has really not changed one bit. There is seemingly no cure for it, just like in the early 1900’s across the World. It is like a tiny flash in the past of what the disease can do to a population.

Luckily for humans, the disease is on the verge of being eradicated. There are very few countries left in the world that have a major issue with TB, and hopefully within the next 20-30 years there will be no more cases of the disease at all once modern medicine can get into places like Swaziland, Africa.

The potato blight was by far the worst thing to ever hit Ireland. While the actual disease did not directly affect the human population, it was so deadly to the crops that it indirectly made it so that almost every person in Ireland starved. The potato in Ireland was the one and only real cash crop. It was the main source of food for the entire country. When the disease hit the potatoes the entire country basically shut down. There was no food at all. Overall this meant that there was no money for selling the crop, there was no food, people lost their houses and land, and had to move away. This led to massive immigration to the United States for promise of a better life. Unfortunately, the reality that most Irish immigrants were hit with in the new world was extreme poverty and manual labor, much like what they just came from.

We now know that Phytophthora infestans is the pathogen that is associated with the potato blight in Ireland. It is proposed that the origin of this pathogen is from the highlands in central Mexico. I think this could still be a huge problem today if the pathogen were to hit another cash crop in a place such as the United States. There are many crucial food groups that the U.S. is very rich in. A few examples would be tobacco, corn, and wheat. If the pathogen that killed off the potatoes in Ireland were to somehow infect one of these three cash crops the U.S. would most definitely be in a lot of trouble. From the livestock to the human beings there would be a major loss in food, and it could really become a large scale problem very fast.

Smallpox is such a devastating disease due to what it does to the skin as well as how infectious it is. Throughout history there have been repeated epidemics that have swept across continents decimating populations. Smallpox has killed hundreds of millions of people over the centuries. In just the 20th century alone, it killed over 300,000,000 people.

Whether you were in the upper echelons of society or living in the slums smallpox did not care. It was an indiscriminate killer that left nobody standing in its wake. The problem with smallpox is that it is a DNA virus which makes it extremely hard to attack especially in medieval times when there was no understanding of DNA or even germs for that matter. Living with the disease was absolutely terrible. It was completely debilitating due to the sores, lesions, and blisters, etc. that completely covered the body. The disease blinded millions of people, nearly 2/3 of all blind people in the 17th and 18th centuries were blind due to smallpox. It would have been extremely hard to see a loved one get the disease because you would be no help to them. touching them would have only infected you as well, so they just had to be left quarantined off by themselves or with other infected people.

Some of the treatments for smallpox in Europe included turkish bath houses, which were basically saunas that cleansed the body. They started to be used as a treatment in the 1700’s after Lady Mary Montagu sent letters back to England claiming that smallpox was not an issue for women in Turkey. Also, came about the use of inoculation or engrafting as a way of helping ward off the disease. Inoculation was not completely safe though. The problem with it was that inoculees could still spread smallpox so had to be isolated. The risk of death went from 20% to 1% with the new method. Edward Jenner later discovered a vaccine for smallpox due to his discovery of how some milkmaids who had gotten cowpox were resistant to smallpox. The way that the vaccine was administered was you were first inoculated with cowpox, once recovered from it they tested to see if you had a reaction to the smallpox inoculation. If you didn’t then you were deemed immune from smallpox. The term vaccine, which now describes all vaccines was coined in 1803 because the word vaccinia = cowpox.

There were three main reasons why someone would object to getting the smallpox vaccine. The first was the social reason. People believed that smallpox reduced the poor population and therefore it was good for society. This I would have to not agree with because we talked about earlier how smallpox was an indiscriminate killer. It did not care what social class you were in, it affected everybody just as badly. Next is the religious reason. There is no real argument against this one, because there would have to be an argument about God, but what those who refused the disease for this reason stated was that it interfered with God’s plan. In their mind, if they got the smallpox disease and died from it then God meant for it to happen and it was okay. The third reason was the scientific reason. There were questions about the nature and safety of the vaccine because at the time it first came out there was still no real understanding of bacteria, and it was very easy to catch other illnesses when being vaccinated. Another complaint was that the source of the vaccine was an animal disease. I would argue this by saying if it works, it works. Who cares what disease it is if it makes you immune to something far worse. The third scientific complaint that was made was that the duration of immunity was unknown. You could be immune for months years. I would have to side pro-vaccine. I think it is far better to receive the vaccine that was originally from cow’s because it will help you in the long run. Cowpox was not nearly as harmful, and much easier to get over than smallpox. I do not agree with what is said about God’s plan. Personally I do not think that God has a plan for anybody to suffer an agonizing death through smallpox so get the vaccine!

Both of the medical studies for syphilis and venereal diseases were horrific and unethical, and both were performed on minorities. Because of these studies it has become very hard for public health officials to gain a large number of participants for their studies. This means that they need to do things, such as stretch the truth to get their participants.

The doctors that were in charge of the Tuskegee experiment stated that it was an “unfortunate experiment.” In the article about their justification for the study they talk about how what they did was grossly immoral, but with moral intentions. The studies that were performed in Alabama were so horrific that they were compared to that of a nazi war camp. One of the arguments the doctors use is that they were not the first study to withhold treatment for individuals and therefore should not be singled out. This to me is incredibly wrong still. That is the same as saying that two wrongs make a right, which we learned in kindergarten is not true.

As stated in African Americans’ views on research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it is no secret that African Americans are very wary of participating in medical studies. This is due in large part because they know of past studies, and how much pain and suffering the participants went through, and that all of the participants were African American. Because of this unethical study it is very hard nowadays to study how African Americans react to certain diseases or drugs in a clinical setting because most of them would not like to go through what those in the Tuskegee experiment did. The issue with medical studies is that people often form their opinion for the drug being tested on the one study. It is a common issue that we talk about in my psychology classes that people generalize and use others experiences to form their own opinion without really knowing anything about the actual issues. These two studies from Guatemala and Tuskegee have shaped how people view all medical studies today and not in a way that medical professionals or health departments would like.

Syphilis is an awful disease that is transmitted through sexual contact. During the 16th century the disease was called the Great Pox because that was the only way to distinguish it from Small Pox which was an epidemic at the time. The early stages of Syphilis are very similar to that of Small Pox, but the name is actually a little misleading because Small Pox is a far deadlier disease due to how easy it is to spread it.

The theory for how syphilis went from a nonvenereal contact transmission to sexual transmission is called the Columbian theory. This theory states that Christopher Columbus brought a nonvenereal form of Syphilis back from the new world back to Europe. The bacterium then responded to new selective pressures by being transmitted sexually. This theory is supported because of a finding from Guyana that found a disease intermediate.

I think that socially the disease needed to change how it was spread because there was less human to human contact like there was in the new world. The old world was much more civilized during the time that Columbus brought the disease back over and therefore there was really no way for it to be transmitted other than sexually. Culturally I think that it was much different as well. Native Americans were mainly living in group homes at the time, going on hunts, killing animals, handling all food without washing their hands, and wearing minimal to no clothing (in warm areas). The cultures of the old world and the new world at this time were completely different. Once it was discovered that the disease was transmitted sexually there was a new effort to try and control sexual encounters outside of marriage.

I think that T. pallidum, or syphilis, today is how it is due to the lack of Small Pox. I think that the prevalence of Small Pox made it extremely easy for this disease to spread because it was being treated the wrong way for hundreds of years. It could go virtually undetected as the disease it really was because it resembled something completely different. Once Small Pox began to die out, and once syphilis was identified as a different disease all together, it was much easier to catch and it had to change how it acted inside of the host. Syphilis has been so deadly throughout history because it is great at mimicking other things to hide what it really is. When other environmental issues change and different diseases take front stage so do the symptoms for syphilis.

I think that one of the main reasons why Typhoid fever was so prevalent in 19th and 20th century NYC was due to the crowded and cramped living quarters, especially in the slums. Back in these days it was very common to not wash your hands, and even washing your hands as we talked about in class is not a sure fire way to avoid typhoid fever. This is because you would have to wash your hands for a ridiculous amount of time to actually clean them well enough. The only way the bacteria could be killed was by cooking it.

The attitudes towards immigrants that lived in the slums or the tenements was not a good one. They were labeled as trash and filthy. This meant that Mary Mallon was treated the same way even though she was a cook, which was considered a very high position of work for an immigrant. They really did not care what happened to her just so long as she stopped infecting the wealthy families that she cooked for.

Back in the days of Mary Mallon the health department was not interested in making sure individual people lived the life they wished. Their argument for isolating Ms. Mallon was that they could not allow her to infect other people and that it was for the greater good of the population. At one point they offered her to send her to Connecticut basically to just get rid of her from NYC and dump her on another state to have to deal with her. Today the strategy for asymptomatic carriers is much better. While they still keep track of known carriers, they are not detained or isolated due to their condition.

The biggest issue that we face today over this type of situation is whether it is justifiable to quarantine somebody. In 2014 during the huge ebola outbreak New York and New Jersey stated that there would be a mandatory quarantine for anyone who had close contact with an ebola victim. The difference between quarantine and isolation, which Typhoid Mary was in, is that isolation is for those who are infected and quarantine is for those suspected. I do not think that it is necessarily justifiable to quarantine people because they were near infected individuals.

The bacteria for the plague is called Yersinia pestis. Unlike in medieval times when humans would call almost any pandemic a plague it is now known that this is the only bacteria that actually causes plague symptoms. It maintains it’s existence through a cycle involving rodents and their fleas. The transmission of these bacteria can be done in three main forms. The first form is through flea bites. Since the fleas get the bacteria from rats when they bite them, they can easily transmit the bacteria to humans when they jump from one organism to the other. The second way you can transmit the disease is through contact with contaminated fluid or tissue. The CDC uses the example of a hunter skinning an animal such as a rabbit without taking the necessary precautions. They can be infected with the bacteria if the animal was carrying it. The third and final way to transmit the plague is through infectious droplets. This is mainly found through plague pneumonia where an organism coughs droplets containing plague bacteria into the air. These droplets can be breathed in by other organisms and in turn they will become infected. 

Most cases of the plague in the US today are bubonic plague and occur due to flea bites. These cases are almost completely located in rural parts of the southwestern United States in places such as New Mexico, Arizona, or California. The plague can be treated with antibiotics. In the case of pneumonic plague the CDC says that patients should be hospitalized and isolated. Lab tests are done to confirm that it is indeed the Plague. There is also an examination of the lymph nodes, blood, and sputum. Antibiotics should be given preferably within 24 hours of the first symptoms. 

The biggest reason for the resurgence of the plague in Madagascar after 2009 is their cultural norm of unburying dead family members to ask them questions about family matters or if you want blessings for fertility. It is a tradition called “turning the bones.” You can only imagine that if a family member died of the plague and then you go in and dig them up to ask them a question and touch them that you will probably be at a very big risk of getting the plague as well. 

Another reason for the resurgence of the plague is due to the large number of rats in the country’s prisons. It is proposed that if the fleas infect these rats than they are also infecting the prisoners, the guards, and any guests that come and go from the prison which would threaten the public.