Dr.. Osama Abu Al-Rub
The new Corona virus outbreak in China, and the high number of deaths and injuries, provide an opportunity to remind the world that wars are not the greatest killers in human history, but there are other and more deadly killers.
It is estimated that wars during the twentieth century killed about 160 million people. In contrast, the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 killed about fifty million people, which is three times the number of those killed in World War I in the same period.
On the other hand, famines in the twentieth century killed between seventy and a hundred million people.
In fact, viruses and epidemics kill every year many more people from wars and military conflicts, let alone when we collect famine deaths.
An epidemic is defined as a case of spread of a specific disease, where the number of cases of infection is greater than expected in a specific community, specific geographical area, season, or time period. This is according to the WHO definition. The epidemic may occur in a restricted geographical area or extend in several countries, and may continue for several days or weeks, and may continue for years.
As for the new Corona virus, its death has reached 425 people, infected twenty thousand in China, almost all of them in Hubei Province (center), the epicenter of the virus, and it has struck 25 countries since it first appeared in December.
There are two common terms, epidemic and outbreak, and while some epidemiologists consider these terms identical, some see that the term epidemic describes a condition that includes a large area and is associated with a major crisis, while the outbreak expresses a pathological spread in a smaller specific region or regions From the epidemic.
The following table shows some of the most serious epidemics the world has known for a century, and it shows the locations of the outbreaks and the number of victims.
The epidemic | the year | the place | The deaths |
Bubonic plague | 1894-1903 | India, China and parts of other regions around the world | 10 million |
Cholera epidemic | 1899-1923 | Indian district of Bengal and moved to the Middle East, North Africa, Russia and parts of Europe | 800 thousand deaths |
Bubonic plague | 1855-1950 | Global spread | 10-15 million deaths |
Spanish flu | 1918-1919 | It affected a large part of the world's population with the end of the First World War | 40-50 million deaths |
Typhus | 1918-1922 | Russia and Eastern Europe | 3 million |
Asian flu | 1957-1958 | The epicenter of this epidemic dates back to China, and spread widely in the winter of 1957 to the spring of 1958, in two sharp waves. | One to four million people in the world |
Hong Kong flu | 1968-1969 | In the opinion of epidemiologists, it was considered the first general epidemic that spread widely in the modern era, i.e. the era of rapid air transport, and the first also that was supervised by a global network | One to two million people |
AIDS | Since 1981 | It is the most deadly of all, and scientists disagree about the source of the epidemic, but most agree that it will pass from monkey to human. | 78 million injured, 39 million of whom died |
SARS (acute respiratory syndrome) | 2002-2003 | He appeared in the southern province of Guangdong | More than 8,000 injured, more than 800 deaths, about 350 of them in China |
H5N1 bird flu | Since 2003 | Avian influenza initially invaded chicken farms in Hong Kong before it spread to humans, and prompted the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency of global dimension. | About 400 deaths |
Swine flu "H1N1" | 2009 | Appeared in Mexico in late March 2009. A warning of the risk of a pandemic was widespread on June 11, 2009, raised on August 10, 2010 | Initially the World Health Organization estimated the deaths at around 18,500, but a review published in the Lancet in 2012 raised it to between 151,000 and 575,000. |
Ebola virus | 2014-2016 | He appeared in Guinea and extended to Sierra Leone and Liberia | The epidemic led to 11,325 deaths |
tuberculosis | 2012 | Global spread | 1.3 million |
Famines
Famine is defined as a severe case of food insecurity in a country or region, as this leads to a higher death rate than usual, due to food shortages, or insufficient access to them due to droughts, diseases, wars or conflicts.
The world has witnessed several famines, the largest of which was in contemporary history that struck China between 1959 and 1961, and led to the deaths of twenty to thirty million people. Also among the major famines was the famine that struck Biafra (Nigeria) between 1967 and 1970, killing one million people.
Other regions of the world suffered from major famines during the past century, as happened in the Soviet Union, Iran and Cambodia, and even Europe also experienced multiple famines in the Middle Ages and during the two world wars.
As for the continent that witnessed the largest number of famines during the past decades, it was the African continent, where Nigeria (the end of the sixties of the last century and the beginning of the seventies) and Ethiopia (1983-1985) witnessed famines, and recorded the last major famine in Somalia in 2011, killing about 260 thousand people.