Pandemics, I

Abstract

‘Pandemics, I: Pandemics in History’ surveys the historical geography of pandemic events. Special attention is paid to those diseases that have manifested as worldwide epidemics and to which the term global pandemic is commonly applied, namely plague, cholera, influenza, and the human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). A synoptic overview of approximately 35 such pandemics since the sixth century AD is presented. Consecutive sections survey the three great plague pandemics of history (Plague of Justinian, Black Death, and the Third Pandemic of the 1850s–1950s); the seven cholera pandemics of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries (including the ongoing pandemic of El Tor cholera); the 24 influenza pandemics of the modern era (including the H1N1/Spanish, H2N2/Asian, H3N2/Hong Kong, and H1N1/09 ‘swine flu’ pandemics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries); and the ongoing pandemic of HIV/AIDS that first emerged in the 1980s.