Plague
Europe Looks to Adapt to the Coronavirus After Enduring Far Worse Pandemics
Even as the United States faces renewed mask mandates and some schools may once again opt for virtual learning due to the increase in the Delta variant of the coronavirus,...
Pandemic History: Disease Outbreaks Have Worsened Inequality Through the Ages
In May 2021, virologist Angela Rasmussen reflected how “if the last 18 months have demonstrated anything, it’s that we would do well to remember the lessons of past pandemics as...
How Do Pandemics End? Experts Say Diseases Almost Never Fade Completely
When will the pandemic end? All these months in, with over 37 million COVID-19 cases and more than 1 million deaths globally, you may be wondering, with increasing exasperation, how long this will continue....
Forget COVID-19: These Three Pandemics Changed the Course of Society
Before March of this year, few probably thought disease could be a significant driver of human history. Not so anymore. People are beginning to understand that the little changes COVID-19...
17th Century Quarantine Breakers Were Condemned by the Clergy. What’s Changed in 400 Years?
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicts between religious freedom and public health regulations have been playing out in courts around the world. Churches from California to Maine have...
Contact Tracing: How Physicians Used It 500 Years Ago to Control the Bubonic Plague
Contact tracing has been remarkably successful at helping contain the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea, Australia and Germany, as well as some smaller places. Using 21st-century systems of telecommunications and...
How Pandemics Past and Present Fuel the Rise of Mega-Corporations
In June 1348, people in England began reporting mysterious symptoms. They started off as mild and vague: headaches, aches, and nausea. This was followed by painful black lumps, or buboes,...
How Plague Bacteria Could Be Hiding Everywhere Around Us
Plague is a highly contagious disease that has killed millions of people over the past 1,400 years. Outbreaks still sporadically occur in as many as 36 countries worldwide. Perhaps one...
Can Donald Trump Battle the ‘Plague’? What History Tells Us Will Happen.
In the fifth century B.C., the playwright Sophocles begins “Oedipus Tyrannos” with the title character struggling to identify the cause of a plague striking his city, Thebes. (Spoiler alert: It’s...
The Coronavirus Is NOT the Black Plague (But It Can Teach Us Lessons)
Concerns over the spread of the novel coronavirus have translated into an economic slowdown. Stock markets have taken a hit: the UK’s FTSE 100 has seen its worst days of trading...
How a Deadly Pandemic Gave Rise to Man-Eating Zombies
Zombies have lurched to the center of Halloween culture, with costumes proliferating as fast as the monsters themselves. This year, you can dress as a zombie prom queen, a zombie...
Plague Was around for Millennia Before Epidemics Took Hold – And the Way People Lived Might Be What Protected Them
One of civilization’s most prolific killers shadowed humans for thousands of years without their knowledge. The bacteria Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague, is thought to be responsible for up...