‘Coronavirus and its friends: Pandemics and plagues that have changed human history’

We have been hit, and hit hard, by a monster called coronavirus. Luckily this is something that doesn’t happen too often, but when it does come, it comes in a different disguise each time, so we give it different names to suit. There have been a surprising number of times that we have been attacked in this way!

The earliest recorded was in 430BC at Athens, when it is said to have slaughtered two-thirds of the population; it is suspected that this was actually typhoid. There seems to have been a lull for nearly 600 years, when the Antonine Plague raised its ugly head in 165AD, most likely the first appearance on earth of smallpox. It first showed itself among the Huns as they swept across Europe. It devastated the Roman Empire, even Emperor Marcus Aurelius became a victim.

In 250AD the Cyprian Plague started in Ethiopia before infecting most of Europe, arriving in England in 444AD. Then there appears to have been another break of a couple of hundred years until 541AD in Egypt; it was the first occasion of the Bubonic Plague and it was another destroyer of the Roman Empire, where it wiped out about 50 million victims and caused major troubles in the worlds of economics and politics (very much like the present little attack). It was known as the Plague of Justinian.

But we have quite a long way to go yet — I had no idea that earth had been affected by so many plagues over the years; it’s rather surprising that we have survived at all! It was 1050 before leprosy reared its ugly head in pandemic proportions, causing the building of numerous leprosy hospitals all over Europe. In those days this slow-developing bacterial disease was thought to be a judgement of God on the bad doings of some families, who were ostracised by their neighbours.

One of the big ones was the Black Death which, in 1350 is said to have killed one third of the world’s population. It was actually a reappearance of the good old Bubonic Plague since 541AD. It was an attack that practically wiped out the Viking races of Scandinavia.

About another century passed comparatively uneventfully before, in 1492 there came the Columbian Exchange, which was actually a mixture of smallpox, measles and Bubonic Plague, brought with them to the Caribbean, by Spanish Conquistadores, resulting in the deaths of ninety percent of the native population, who had never experienced such illnesses before and had no natural protection against them.

Again, there is a break of about 200 years before the Great Plague of London, which killed some 20 per cent of the population in just one year, between 1665 and 1666. Once again it was caused by the Bubonic Plague, something which seems to keep showing itself — I wonder when we shall see it once more?

We now come more into the modern era, 1817 to be exact, the time of the First Cholera Pandemic, which started in Russia and occurred seven times in the next few years. In fact it was still around, in World War I, and during that fairly considerable period of time it slaughtered 15,000 people, military and civilian.

In 1855 came what was known as The Third Plague (again Bubonic), starting in China and killing 15 million people. It was carried and spread by fleas and was still in evidence as recently as 1960 in some parts of the world.

A short break of about 20 years and in 1875 it was the Fiji Measles, a disease that was unfortunately spread from its home territory to the rest of the world by Queen Victoria and her entourage, who visited the island and took it back to England, where it caused the deaths of 4,000 individuals.

Next, in 1889 The Eastern part of Europe suffered what became known as the Russian Flu, because that was where it originated. Around 360,000 Eastern Europeans died from that one!

The big one was just after World War I in 1918, the Spanish Flu, carried by birds, sort of messengers of death I suppose. It started in Madrid and by the end of it more than 50 million souls had departed the earth, from all over Europe; it killed more people than the previous four years of war had!

Almost recently was the Asian Flu (1957), which started in Hong Kong, hence its name. It killed 14,000 people in England alone, once it got there. There was a second wave in 1958 and overall 11.1 million were killed, 116,000 in the United States alone!

In 1981 it was HIV/AIDS, which first came from a chimpanzee in 1920, but by the 1960s it was considered a homosexual disease, though anyone can catch it now, as a sexually transmitted disease of both sexes.

We are almost at the end of our sad tale with the 2003 SARS epidemic caused by bats, passed to cats and so to us. Not as serious as some, only 8,096 suffered from it and 774 died.

And so we come to the present, declared pandemic as recently as March 11. At the time of my writing it had victimised 118,000 people and it ain’t finished yet! Who knows what will happen next …

Keen to share your thoughts with other 60-pluses? You can sign up as a contributor and submit your stories to Starts at 60. While you’re at it, why not join the Starts at 60 Bloggers Club to talk to other writers in the Starts at 60 community and learn more about how to write for Starts at 60. Community blogs published on the website go into the draw for some great weekly prizes.