A pandemic is a pandemic disease that affects many people in different countries.
A pandemic is an epidemic disease that affects several countries and attacks almost all people in a geographic region. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "gathering of the people" and whose meaning has been extended to "disease of the entire people."
Epidemics are diseases that affect many people simultaneously as they spread over a certain period of time in a certain area. These epidemiological outbreaks cause the incidence of a disease to be higher than expected by specialists (there are more sick people than expected).
Emergence of a pandemic
There are three conditions that generally need to be met for a pandemic to occur. In principle, it must be a new virus that has not circulated before. This means that there is no population that has developed immunity .
Furthermore, the virus must be able to be transmitted from person to person effectively and must be capable of producing a serious illness. The World Health Organization (WHO) distinguishes between different phases that correspond to the stages that a pandemic goes through during its expansion.
The COVID-19 pandemic lasted from 2020 to 2023.
Historical examples
The Black Death of the 14th century is an example of a pandemic. The outbreak of bubonic plague began in Asia , then reached the Mediterranean and finally spread throughout Western Europe due to the travels of merchants. It is estimated that this pandemic killed about twenty million European citizens in six years.
Historically, there have been other pandemics that have caused millions of deaths around the world. This would be the case, for example, of typhus , which is also called "camp fever" because it was common for it to appear during times of war. Specifically, in Spain, the time when it caused the most damage among the population was during the conflicts between Muslims and Christians in the Granada area.
Smallpox and cholera are other pandemics that have caused havoc over the centuries, not to mention others that appeared in very specific parts of the world. Among the latter would be the well-known Plague of Athens , which arose during the Peloponnesian War , or the Hong Kong Flu , which appeared in the 1960s.
Modern pandemics
Similarly, other diseases such as HIV ( Human Immunodeficiency Virus ), which causes AIDS , have also been classified as pandemics by the WHO . This is a pathology that, among other things, causes a person's immune system to be unable to deal with infections.
The fact that it has spread rapidly around the world has led the aforementioned international institution to classify it as a pandemic. It is believed that, in the African continent alone, it may have caused the death of more than twenty million people.
Swine flu , influenza A or H1N1 flu and COVID-19 are other diseases that became pandemics, affecting a large number of human beings worldwide .