Nerd Notes: Pandemic Panic and a Little Historical Perspective

One of the problems of a 24/7 cable news cycle is that the news media keeps hammering at a given topic until all perspective is lost in the endless drumbeat of talking, analyzing, overanalyzing, speculation, and so forth.

Take swine flu. It is a health hazard, but can we please not panic?

Also, people are muddling the language. An outbreak is not the same thing as an epidemic is not the same thing as a pandemic. A rough rule of thumb is that an epidemic is localized while a pandemic is global. E.g., An epidemic of the plague at Messina, Sicily, in October of 1347 turned into a pandemic throughout Europe in the next four or so years.

Anyway, here is a little historical perspective of 5 other (viral or bacterial) disease events in history. In brief:

1. The plague at Athens in 430 BC (disease not securely identified, though numerous possibilities have been suggested)
   
2. The "Antonine plague" at Rome in 165 AD (possibly smallpox or measles)
   
3. The "plague of Justinian" at Byzantium in 541-542 AD (bubonic plague)
4. The Black Death that swept through Europe in 1347-1351 and killed up to one-third of the population (bubonic plague)
5. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 that killed at least 20 million worldwide
   

The list doesn't include plenty of other deadly disease events, such as smallpox in the New World that all but wiped out native populations, the plague of London in 1665-1666, or the modern AIDS/HIV.