• Covid-19 map of the coronavirus in Spain
  • Italy.When will the coronavirus peak? When will the epidemic end?
  • Health: coronavirus symptoms, treatment and how to avoid contagion
  • Assistance Coronavirus: consultation phone numbers in each autonomous community

Since the written history appears, there are already testimonies of these massive diseases, also called plagues, that caused massive deaths. The Bible already describes in the famous plagues of Egypt a series of catastrophes including, without a doubt, epidemics of great virulence. Homer's Iliad also includes episodes of this nature and years later, Thucydices' description of the plague that ravaged Athens , between 430 and 426 BC, during the Peloponnesian Wars, and that today is identified with exanthematous typhus or with typhoid fever , and that ended with Pericles himself. There are also testimonies from antiquity of recurrent fevers that could be identified as malaria , which is still the scourge of most of sub-Saharan Africa and large areas of America and Asia even today, and which was also present in Europe up to a few hundred years ago.

So present and deadly were they, as well as the evidence of their transmission by contagion, which was soon used as a weapon of war by the various conquering powers, launching dead bodies by catapults against enemy cities or camps: bacteriological warfare was born. Testimonies of successive epidemics are repeated over the years by Roman, Greek, and Byzantine authors, deducing from the symptoms they report that they were faced with smallpox, bubonic plague, typhus, cholera and other varied and deadly ailments. Better known was leprosy , originating in India and spread throughout the East in antiquity and which was introduced to Europe by the Roman legions, becoming a common evil in medieval Europe, although it did not cause sudden great damage.

Much more serious was the so-called great plague of Justinian that caused, in three years, some 300,000 deaths in Constantinople, which would have meant the loss of a third of its population. This was the first great epidemic of those that for more than two hundred years would come from the East through the Byzantine Empire and would affect, first of all, the Mediterranean basin and then the whole of Europe. Before them it was only possible to pray (they were attributed to divine punishments for the sins of man), isolate the sick and the use of traditional methods to clean unhealthy airs, such as burning fragrant woods. Without a doubt, this was no stranger to the progressive decline to which Byzantium was subjected from then on. However, the plagues did not understand religions and in 745 a new epidemic struck Damascus , contributing to the decline of the Umayyads. Later, in the middle of the 11th century, a new scourge scourge shook Egypt and Syria , jeopardizing the Fatimid power.

SYPHILIS AND SWEAT ENGLISH

This bubonic plague pandemic has the sad merit of being the most famous in history. Its origins date back to the middle of the 13th century, to the Chinese region of Yunnan , where it was contracted by the Mongol armies that had subdued it. The fleas carrying the disease not only affected rats, but also other rodents such as marmots, martens or foxes, whose skins were widely used by the Mongols. In this way the disease would have passed to the human being and in 1331 it would have spread throughout China and Mongolia . The Silk Road would have been the carrier channel, and in 1346 it was already detected in Crimea. From there the Genoese transport it and a year later Constantinople is devastated and from there, already with the black rat as the main transmission vector, it progresses throughout Europe until 1354. A third of the 75 million people who lived in Europe then died, causing a social and economic catastrophe. Until the eighteenth century there were occasional new shoots, although none had the destructive capacity of the one from 1354. As always, prayer and quarantines were the usual methods, combined with other more imaginative ones such as carrying aromatic plants, or putting plucked toads or roosters together buboes to absorb their poisons.

Image that portrays the methods used to combat epidemics, including praying and isolating the sick.

With the arrival of the Modern Age a series of more or less new diseases appeared. One was the so-called English sweat, which mainly affected young men in good position. For many years it was considered a kind of flu; in the mid-20th century it was attributed to poisonous fungi that had infected cereals, and more recently it has been classified as a hemorrhagic fever . Another epidemic that, although known since the 9th century, seemed to expand suddenly in the 16th century, was diphtheria or garrotillo, which caused special mortality among the child population after the throat became inflamed and caused death by suffocation. Along with these diseases was also the deadly smallpox, which, although consolidated in Europe since the 6th century, was especially serious as it was carried by Europeans around the world, through their discovering expeditions in the 16th century.

At the end of the XV century, a new epidemic appeared: syphilis . It is still debated whether its origins lie in the American territories recently discovered by Columbus, or whether it was already latent in Europe. However, unlike the previous ones that equally threatened every human being, which were blind and unavoidable, the new epidemic was soon shown to be associated with sexual practice, so it acquired a tinge of clear divine punishment in the face of conscious practices and immoral of promiscuity. In this regard, AIDS has a clear parallel with it.

THE WHITE PLAGUE

The heyday of trade and the beginnings of industrialization at the beginning of the 19th century triggered rapid urban growth. This was not in accordance with improvements in public hygiene, so that together with the high concentration of inhabitants in the motley cities and the poor diet of a large part of its inhabitants, a perfect breeding ground was created for old diseases to now find a magnificent field of contagion and expansion. Among them, tuberculosis , also called white plague, appears with unusual force, which the working class preferably suffered, given its harsh living and working conditions, particularly overcrowding and poor diet, becoming chronic in cities throughout the XIX century and beginning of the XX.

Also, since the end of the 18th century and a good part of the 19th century, Europe was plagued by yellow fever or black vomiting , a tropical disease that, like malaria, is transmitted by the female of a mosquito. Since this insect is the transmitting vector, a habitat for moisture and heat is required for it to survive. This made the coastal areas, in summer, the ideal place for its propagation, since the mosquito died when night temperatures dropped from approximately 200 meters above sea level.

First American soldiers affected by the Spanish flu.

In 1741, she arrived in Cádiz on the ships that linked her to Cuba , the same as in 1800, causing in each of those years nearly 10,000 victims. Its extension in the following years by all the cities and towns of the Andalusian and Mediterranean coast made up to 1805 more than 100,000 deaths. During the following years it became endemic, mixing with the convulsions of the War of Independence and the struggles between liberals and absolutists. The wave that affected Barcelon in 1821 was especially virulent, with 10% of the population dying. Years later, in 1870, the city would suffer again, although on this occasion "only" about 4,000 people would die. The balance was tragic: victims throughout the Peninsula, from the mid-eighteenth century to the last epidemic in 1870, can be estimated at around 150,000. However, it continued to be endemic in Cuba, where it is estimated that throughout the 19th century it killed nearly 100,000 residents, preferably targeting Spanish soldiers who had just arrived and who were more vulnerable, having never been exposed to the disease.

The ten horsemen of terror

  • CHOLERA : Bacterial origin (Vibrio cholerae). It affects the digestive and intestinal systems.
  • DIPHTERIA : Bacterial origin (Corynebacterium diphtheriae or Klebs-Löffler's bacillus). It inflames the upper respiratory and digestive tracts and can cause swelling of the skin.
  • YELLOW FEVER: Viral origin (from the Flaviviridae family). Mosquito-borne. Elevated fevers, headaches, nausea, jaundice, and bleeding.
  • INFLUENZA: Viral origin (family of Orthomyxoviridae). Pain, congestion, fever, expectoration.
  • MALARIA: Parasitic origin (parasites of the genus Plasmodium). Transmitted by various species of mosquito of the genus Anopheles. Chills, nausea, headaches, and fevers.
  • BUBONIC PLAGUE: Bacterial origin (Yersinia pestis). Swelling of the lymph nodes and generalized sepsis.
  • SYPHILIS: Bacterial origin (Treponema pallidum). Sores, collapse of the nervous system.
  • TYPHUS: Bacterial origin (various species of Rickettsia). Transmitted by the bite of lice and ticks. Fever and headache.
  • TUBERCULOSIS: Bacterial origin (Mycobacterium tuberculosis). Pain, general infection.
  • SMALLPOX: Viral origin (Variola virus). Rashes, fever, bleeding.

Cholera was another of the epidemic scourges existing since Antiquity, but until the 19th century it was confined, almost exclusively, on the Asian continent. At the beginning of that century, it jumps through the active commercial routes to Europe; Once again, Constantinople is the gateway in 1823. Ten years later, it had already infected the entire Mediterranean basin and spread to America . Once again, the cities that began to grow disorderly, with an insufficient water system and unable to segregate the clean waters from the dirty ones, combined with the summer heat, became the perfect breeding ground for the disease. Spain suffered epidemics in 1833 and 1834, in 1854, 1865 and 1885, becoming the great murderer of the Spanish population, as there are an estimated 800,000 victims caused by the chain of cholera epidemics suffered throughout the 19th century. Once again, classism was one of the criteria for the spread of the disease. It had already been with tuberculosis, which affected less the well-fed and those who lived in better conditions; with yellow fever the same thing happened, because whoever could get away from the coast and go live inland also got rid of it. In the case of cholera, the neighborhoods that had a better water network and whose density of users was lower, had a lower incidence of those affected.

The context of the Carlist wars and the pronouncements further aggravated their consequences. Not only because the armies on the move were ideal transmitters of the disease, but because the exalted populace was soon seen to be responsible. Thus, in July 1834, the famous slaughter of friars took place in Madrid , almost one hundred, accused of poisoning the sources. Surely its instigators had not forgotten how, during the Liberal Triennium, the Church had accused the Government of unleashing the wrath of God through yellow fever. With these events a fierce anticlericalism was inaugurated that would be present in Spain for more than a hundred years.

IMPOTENT GOVERNMENTS

In March 1918 the last great epidemic was unleashed. It was responsible for an avian influenza virus that mutated and affected human beings; something very similar to what happened recently. Its origin was established in Kansas (USA) and the soldiers who came to France to fight in the Great War were in charge of spreading it. Apart from the airways, it affected the neurological system, causing Von Economo encephalitis . A second wave occurred in the fall, and a third and fourth more, less lethal, in 1919 and 1920. The seaways and the railway were in charge of propagating it, and in a few months everyone was affected, calculating the number of deaths caused. In Spain the official figures spoke of 147,114 deaths, but the real data doubled this amount. In 1918 alone, 700,000 people died in Spain and nearly half were due to influenza or its aftermath. An example of its dangerousness: of the 6,000 inhabitants of Medina del Campo , a railway hub, 5,200 became ill and 420 died.

Powerless governments attended the epidemic; They banned shows and closed schools, but authorized masses and conferences on the subject. There was talk that it was a poison put into circulation by the German Bayer , that it was the product of the glue of the stamps or that they were telluric vapors resulting from the works of the Madrid metro. People fought it as best they could. Its deadly effects further excited the social unrest that permeated the labor movement of those years and hygiene measures were accentuated, thinking that something might help. Among them, a transcendent and already irreversible measure for our daily life: every new home should have a toilet that replaces the group that was per floor in the apartment houses.

A LEAD SARCOPHAGUS TO SEPULT THE BACILIUM

It did not originate in Spain, but in Kansas , nor did it enter Europe through the Peninsula, but through France and England, in the lungs of the soldiers who landed to fight in the Great War .

But the fact that the Spanish press - outside the conflict and, therefore, censorship - was the first and most prolific to report the disease, linked the name "Spanish" forever to the most devastating flu in history. .

Since then, scientists around the world have repeatedly tried to recover the genetic remains of the bacillus, to better understand how the microorganism worked, rebuilding it even in laboratories.

Last fall, a team of London researchers unearthed the body of Sir Mark Sykes , an English aristocrat who died in 1919 as a result of the disease, and buried in a lead coffin that could preserve the DNA of that deadly flu virus in perfect condition , with the aim of trying to develop drugs against a hypothetical new pandemic.

* This text was published in The Adventure of History on February 3, 2016 by the historian Juan Carlos Losada

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • diphtheria
  • Flu
  • Science and health
  • Covid 19
  • Coronavirus

COVID-19China changes method of accounting for COVID-19 coronavirus cases and death toll skyrockets

Covid-19Coronavirus in China: "I am seeing a corpse removed from a bag"

StoriesCarmen, 81 years old, four days without leaving home: "Until Monday I was calm. Now I don't know what to think"