Viruses: The Global Epidemic

             

Earlier when we used to think about a global catastrophe the only thing that used to come in our mind was a nuclear war, but the scenario has changed over  time. Today when we talk about a global catastrophe or a global pandemic what comes to our mind is a virus, an infectious virus. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades  then it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. The world has invested a huge  amount of money in nuclear weapons but very little in a system that could stop an epidemic.

There are actually two types of viruses, first is the viruses that infect animals, and animals pass them to other animals, and then there are viruses that infect humans and we pass them to other humans. Suppose a person is having a human virus and he/she goes to the market and purchases chicken that has an animal virus and eats it without cooking it properly, so now that person is having two viruses inside him/her an animal virus and a human virus but in almost all the cases the animal virus proves to be far more toxic and far more deadly.  And this is what happening today, we are facing the global pandemic of COVID 19.  

Let us have a look at some of the deadly viruses that led to a global pandemic.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 which infected 50% of the worlds population at that time and probably killed one out of every ten people. This virus came in three different waves with a gap of 6 months and the second wave killed every single person who got the flu, which shows how deadly a flu can be. 

The Asian Flu of 1957 which originated from China claimed more than a million peoples life. The data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention shows that this virus spread rapidly all over the world and claimed 1.1 million lives with 116,000 deaths in United States itself.

The H1N1 Swine Flu 2009 originated in Mexico and affected more than 1.4 billion people across the world in just one year. Unlike other viruses that mainly affects the old aged people who are above 65, this virus affected the younger generation  especially children. 

Western Africa Ebola Virus 2014 is assumed to have originated from bats. Ebola devastated the West Africa during 2014-2016 with 28,600 reported cases and 11,325 deaths. There is still no vaccine available for Ebola but the efforts are ongoing to develop a vaccine.

COVID19 is a specific subsets of the corona viruses and has some unique characteristics, it uses RNA instead of DNA as its genetic material and they are covered in spikes on the surface of the virus and  use these spikes to invade into humans, these spikes are the corona in the Corona Virus. COVID 19 is known as a novel Corona virus because until December 2019 we had only heard about six  corona viruses  and this COVID 19 is the seventh type. If we remember about the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), these were corona viruses and they both are called respiratory syndromes because that is what corona virus does, they attack on our lungs. Corona Viruses are zoonotic that means they transfer from animals to human beings but COVID 19 gets transferred from person to person which travels more faster and  farther. COVID 19 is most likely to have escaped from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan China. Currently (10/08/2020) there are 19.8 million confirmed cases and 730 K deaths reported worldwide because of COVID 19. Till date there is no vaccine available for this deadly disease. This virus is going to get worse before it gets better, we are seeing cases of human transmission that are not caused by returning from a travel instead they are just happening in the community. And there are people infected with COVID 19 who don't even know from where this virus came from. These are signs of an outbreak getting worse not of an outbreak that is under control.

This is not the only major outbreak that we are ever going to see, there will be more outbreaks and epidemics and this is the result of the way we as human beings are interacting with our planet. Human choices are driving us to a position where we are going to see more outbreaks. We cannot completely stop these outbreaks but we can get prepared for them to reduce the damages caused by them, this can be done by:

Building the Global Health System: This is a very serious need of today we need to build a global health system, to support the core health functions in every country all over the world. So that all the countries would be able to rapidly identify and treat the new infectious diseases as they emerge and report about them to the world. If we would have been perfectly prepared for COVID 19 then China would have identified the outbreak faster, they would have been ready to provide treatment to infected people without building new hospitals and they would have shared honest information with the global health authorities so that they could start reporting to the national health systems and getting ready if the virus spreads.

COVID 19 has also revealed some of the real weaknesses in the global health supply chains, during the crisis if a country runs out of face masks or personal protective equipment then we have to order them to the supplier, we have to wait for them to produce and we have to wait for them to ship it, generally from China. This is the time we probably need to shift our investment from investing on nuclear weapons to investing on a much stronger health care system that could be ready for future outbreaks.