English

Abstract

The outbreak of an infectious disease and its spread beyond geographic boundaries which leads to a high mortality is declared as pandemic. The factors responsible for pandemic are globalization and travel of people across the world for education, employment, business etc. On March 11, 2020 the corona virus outbreak was declared as pandemic by the World Health Organization. Nevertheless, India was one of the countries affected by the coronavirus outbreak. This article describes the epidemics and pandemics in India since 20th century. But, India was a sufferer of few serious pandemics even before that which are mentioned in brief in this article. Every pandemic has some similar and some dissimilar set of characteristics. All the possible precautionary measures should be taken to avoid transmission within the country and to other countries. In this article, the sincere efforts have been put into compilation of all these natural disasters to alert the dental and medical professionals about the mistakes they might have committed in dealing with an outbreak in the past or how they would overcome or face the current issues. Fortunately India has fought against all these calamites bravely and successfully. Nevertheless during COVID-19 also, India is maintaining better control over the disease spread irrespective of its limited resources and dense population. Though overall incidence of new cases is reducing day by day, COVID-19 still exists in India and all over the world. A widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time is termed as “endemic’. However, if the outbreak of a disease occurs due to its high infectious potential it can lead to a high mortality rate, and so is declared as a pandemic. The globalization and travel of people across the world is usually responsible for pandemic. India has handled many epidemics and pandemics as revealed by history. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak as pandemic on March 11, 2020. Basically the disease originated in China, as the first case of COVID-19 infection was diagnosed in Wuhan city of China. Large number of cases were detected to be suffering from the same disease in China as it was a highly contagious disease. Presently, the disease has spread all over the world like a storm, affecting most of the countries, with the highest number of infected cases in U.S., Italy and Spain. India is also one of the victim countries. Taking into account the rapid spread of disease COVID 19 is the topic of great worry in India due to its high population density. This article describes the epidemics and pandemics since 20th century. But, India was a sufferer of few serious pandemics even before that such as Cholera Pandemic in 5 phases, Bombay Plague Epidemic and VIth Cholera Pandemic in 19thcentury.