As a biology major, when I signed up for this class I was most interested in learning more about how the viruses or other agents attached themselves and gain entry into the body. As the course progressed I came to become fascinated by the various ways different diseases have taken hold in cultures and how we as people came to understand them. Virology and cell biology is where my true interests lie in Biology but analyzing the ways epidemics have developed and how the diseases have evolved to be more effective against us.
One of the watershed moments in humanity was the Black Death in Europe. It was one of the greatest losses of life in history and caused some of the worst in humanity to come out. There was a spike in racism against Jews of the time as Christians blamed them for their woes and thought they were poisoning the wells. But, there may have also been some benefits as it contributed to humanity rising out of the Dark Ages and an increase in trade and work because so many died leaving a large gap in the labor force.
I think the case study of smallpox is one of the more interesting cases of especially as it is considered one of the earlier cases of biological warfare. Looking back on the artifact though it is amazing that it showed up at so many different points in history and it was still the fault of miasmas and swamp gas. It showed up multiple times in Europe, with the conquistadors, the African slaves, and the early British settlers and still people could not understand what was going on. One of the most commonly used examples of early biological warfare is the time the British settlers gave Native Americans smallpox infected blankets. The Native Americans had no natural immunity to smallpox and the disease ravaged their population. Personally, I am not convinced that the British intentionally infected the Native Americans with smallpox. As previously mentioned disease back then was caused by miasmas and modes of transmission were not truly understood by the people of the time. It would be interesting to delve into the reasoning the settlers gave in gifting the blankets as it may have actually been a gift that benefitted them on accident. That is just one small example of the way diseases played a role in warfare and even today biological warfare is still vitally important in terms of how countries go about planning for war.
The population has expanded at an almost unthinkable rate over the last couple of hundred years. This expansion has brought humans into closer and closer contact with animals and the diseases they carry. Over the last few years we have seen the explosion of diseases like Zika and Ebola. These diseases came about two fairly similar ways, countries that do not follow good health protocols have seen an increase in diseases like this. In Bangladesh it showed up in date palm sap, which is considered a delicacy and is not passed through a cleaning process and the bats urinate in the containers and the disease spread to humans. Two diseases that were relatively unknown or contained until recently. With the growing globalization of the world it is easier and easier for these diseases to take hold. For my research project I focused on the Nipah virus, a bat-borne virus focused in Southeast Asia. Some of these viruses, like Nipah and Ebola, are so deadly to humans that we are dead-end hosts to them and it burns itself out before it can infect too many people. A lot of the public fear nowadays is focused on epidemics with proportions of old, you can see it portrayed in movies like contagion. A lot of the things people are so afraid of though are things like Nipah and Ebola which would struggle to have an outbreak of those sizes due to their mortality rate and the fact that they would struggle to take hold in civilized societies due to health protocols.
All in all, this class showed me a lot about how humanity has endured throughout time and how we have grown as a race. There have been devastating epidemics in history, the black death, smallpox has killed hundreds of millions of people, the flu epidemic, and many others that may not have even been recorded. Yet we have survived and thrived. We will likely see another epidemic, probably in my lifetime and it will also probably be a new disease as we see the rapid expansion of the human race.