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 everyone in a geographic region. The term comes from a Greek word that means "gathering of the people" and whose meaning has been extended as "illness of all the 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 level of incidence of a disease to be higher than expected by specialists (there are more patients than expected).
Emergence of a pandemic
There are three conditions that generally must be met for a pandemic to appear. In principle, it must be a new virus that has not previously circulated. This assumes that there is no population that has developed immunity .
On the other hand, the virus must be able to be transmitted from person to person effectively and must be capable of causing serious illness. The World Health Organization (WHO) distinguishes between various phases that correspond to the stages that a pandemic goes through during its expansion.
The COVID-19 pandemic lasted between 2020 and 2023.
Historical examples
The Black Death of the 14th century is an example of a pandemic. The epidemiological 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 around 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" since it was common for it to appear in times of war. Specifically, in Spain the moment in which it caused the most havoc among the population was during the conflicts between Muslims and Christians in the area of Granada .
Smallpox or cholera are other of those pandemics that have caused havoc over the centuries, without forgetting others that appeared in very specific points of the world's geography. Among the latter would be the well-known Plague of Athens , which emerged during the Peloponnesian War , or the Hong Kong Flu , which made an appearance in the 1960s.
Modern pandemics
In the same way, other diseases have also been classified as a pandemic by the WHO, such as HIV ( Human Immunodeficiency Virus ), which causes AIDS . It is a pathology that, among other things, means that a person's immune system is not able to deal with infections.
The fact that it has spread rapidly throughout the world has led the aforementioned international institution to classify it as a pandemic. And it is considered that, on the African continent alone, it has caused the death of more than twenty million people.
Swine flu , influenza A or H1N1 flu and COVID-19 are other diseases that became a pandemic, affecting a large number of humans worldwide .