Artifact #1
Throughout histories plagues have been prevalent in our society from time to time. Even in society where hygiene is much better than when it was hundreds of years ago. The main reasons a disease spreads is due to its transmissibility and resilience of the microorganisms. Once people started to form tribes and live closer, it makes much easier for a disease to get spread from person to person, or even animal to person. Today you see this even more to be true with globalization, urbanization, climate change, and deforestation. With humans building so closely to the environment, animals that once did not come into human contact, now are frequently seen and interact with humans. These animals can carry unseen and unknown zoonotic diseases, meaning that they can be passed from animal to animal as well as person to person. This can cause a problem if the person contracts some microorganism that is unknown and not studied, and has no cure to treat the disease, or the microbe is resistant to the known cures. Antibiotic resistant bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus. This is caused in various ways; many people are treated with the same drug over and over such as penicillin, or the bacteria became resistant from the wastewater of hospitals where antibiotics can be found in the urine from patients. In any case, this can cause many problems and causing the patient to have chronic symptoms or die from their symptoms. The overcrowding of cities and how densely populated they are, is also a current issue. This allows for transmissible diseases to have a higher chance of affecting another person and spreading even further and creating issues for hospitals and healthcare personnel. Air borne diseases such as measles or the new outbreak of the corona virus in China has made the infectious disease a nightmare due to it starting a highly populated city of 11 million people and how globalized the city is. Not so much in China, but in the United States, there is a group of people termed “anti-vaxxers” who do not believe in vaccinating themselves or their children. This has led to children, usually of young ages of contracting diseases, such has measles, which has even caused some to die. This comes from the parents believing vaccines are bad, it causes autism in young children, and then letting the child interact with others from various places with a very weak and new immune system. Some religions also take the same stance in not allowing their people of worship to get vaccinations, this has most notably happened in Thailand and Indonesia with the Islamic religion in 2017. For a historical perceptive, many ideologies of hygiene have changed as well as development in medicine and public health. Some developments such as, wastewater treatment facilities, cleaning of the water, sewage systems, and garbage disposal have all helped with reducing infectious diseases. Cholera for example can manifest from dirty and untreated water. Regulation of food, in most countries, have led to a reduction in diseases, the corona virus is in a country where a wider variety of animals are eaten, and not so closely regulated, which is a cause for this outbreak. Years ago, doctors did not wash their hands or wear protection while operating on their patients or giving them a check-up. Whatever bacteria was on the doctor’s hands or was inside the person’s body, most likely got transferred and led infection and disease. Also, the ability to trace the breakout of the disease back to its source was not capable of the technology, depending on when you are looking back in time. If the source is not stopped and eradicated, it can cause even further spread of the disease. An example of this would be the epidemic of the Bubonic plague otherwise known as the black death in the 14th century. It is known today that the disease was carried on ships by rats which were given to them by fleas. The plague is a zoonotic disease and can be easily passed from animal to animal as well as person to person, which is what made the plague so deadly. If sailors, and cities which had ports had known this was the cause, the impact the plague made could have been greatly reduced than a third of the European population.
Works Cited
https://www.ancient.eu/article/782/justinians-plague-541-542-ce/
https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/about.html
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/religion-vaccination-confusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague