It Won’t Be The Last One
By: Nana Dadzie Ghansah
Tags: Pandemic, Epidemic, Virus, Covid 19, Public Health

By Nana Dadzie Ghansah

Sooner or later, the world will gain control over the COVID-19 outbreak. It will be through containment, effective treatment, a vaccine or a combination of the three. History teaches that. Even the Black Death ended. Even the incurable HIV/AIDS has been controlled.

History also tells us that sooner or later, human behavior will lead to another epidemic or even pandemic. How is that?

Disease outbreaks occur through uncleanliness, vectors, lack of prevention (Anti-Vaxxers etc.) and zoonotic spillovers.

There are areas of the world that still lack clean drinking water and these areas still have outbreaks of cholera and typhoid.

The mosquito still transmits yellow fever and other viral diseases that are endemic in areas in the Tropics and flare up into epidemics every now and then. Even the bubonic plague broke out not too long ago in Madagascar!

Then is the fact that viruses are spilling over from other mammals to humans causing events like the COVID-19 and SARS outbreaks.

Lastly, refusal by some to get vaccinated means that occasionally, we are going to see diseases like measles and polio break out.

Human behavior does not only lead to the direct breakout of diseases. What we do after these disease break out will ensure that we will forever see epidemics or even pandemics.

Since time immemorial, the attitude of those in power towards the outbreak of diseases has worsened these events.

One can almost predict these reactions and the Chinese authorities epitomized it wonderfully during the initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in December 2019. Instead of appreciating the observations of Li Wenliang and his colleagues that there was a new cluster of patients presenting with SARS-like pneumonia, they censored them.

When a disease breaks out, there are always those, often healthcare workers, who notice the initial cluster of cases and sound the alarm.

Those in power will often deny these reports. Then as the cases mount, they’ll seek to suppress the scientific or observational findings of those who are seeing this cluster swell.

When that does not work, they try to argue that things are not so bad.

By the time leaders realize things are bad, the initial outbreak is beyond containment.

We can forgive the lack of scientific knowledge for the reasons leaders in the Antiquity and Middle Ages gave for the epidemics that afflicted them. The Antonine plaque of 165 AD in the Roman Empire was blamed on an angry Jupiter. It was smallpox. The Church claimed The Black Death was due to bad miasma. Others said it was caused by the Jews and slaughtered them for that. It was bubonic plague.

(Looking at how Copernicus and Galileo were treated, I doubt the Church would have listened.)

However, to deny outbreaks, seek to suppress their reporting or make light of their severity has to be unforgivable in our present times. This is especially egregious since early action can contain disease outbreaks. And yet those in power do it.

We saw President Woodrow Wilson and other allied leaders do it during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 leading to 50 million people dying worldwide. They suppressed information about the epidemic so as not to depress morale during the 1st World War.

It happened during the outbreaks of bubonic plague in San Francisco in the early 1900s. 190 people ended up dying.

We saw President Reagan avoid the issue of HIV/AIDs until 1985.

We saw several African Heads of States, like Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, refuse to accept the fact that HIV/AIDs was killing their people in the 1990s and 2000s.

We have seen the Chinese reactions to SARs and COVID-19.

It is not only leaders who misbehave when diseases break out. Among the general population, denial abounds too. That is often compounded by crazy conspiracy theories. This is followed by a period of panic and hysteria. When these reactions do not work, fear sets in. Deep crippling fear. Finally, people learn to accept the new reality and a rational response ensues. In that regard, we of the present day are no different than the Flagellants in Europe of the 14th century, who whipped themselves bloody to get God to stop the plague during Black Death.

Another factor that adds to the possibility is the unwillingness by governments to spend the money necessary to prevent these diseases from breaking out. Preventive programs in the hotspots of the world are often underfunded. Even developed nations are cutting back. The US recently axed its Pandemic Team as well as the PREDICT Program — a program made of scientists working around the world to hunt down the viruses, like COVID-19, that could lead to the next epidemic or pandemic.

So yes, human behavior being what it is plus economic policy that often short changes public health, we will continue to see epidemics and pandemics. Even in spite of all the scientific advancements, yes, we will continue to see these events.