To fight coronavirus, look to pandemics past
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What historical pandemics set the stage for understanding COVID‑19?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hello and welcome to a Health Report special podcast extra with me, Norman Swann. It's a panel discussion recorded at the World Science Festival in Brisbane last year on the history and future of pandemics and epidemics. We were actually going to hold off on broadcasting it because it's out of date. It doesn't cover the coronavirus pandemic spreading across the globe. But for those interested, and hopefully that's you, in understanding the background and context of modern pandemics, still might be very valuable. We cover how diseases jump from animals to humans, how health authorities tackle pandemics, and the twisting path to treatments and vaccines. In fact, they're all key components to understanding the ongoing response to COVID nineteen.
Joining me on the panel were John Epstein, who's Vice President of EcoHealth, Kathy Andrews from the Institute of Drug Discovery at Griffith University, Rina McIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity at the University of New South Wales, Kirby Institute, who's been on several health report programs recently and she's everywhere talking about coronavirus. And Peter Anne Zimmerman, who directs the Graduate Infection Prevention and Control Programme at Griffith University. And Peter Anne begins by guiding us through some of history's nastiest outbreaks like the plague in nineteen eighteen Spanish flu. Well welcome to you all. Pedane, just take us through that timeline and illustrate some of these themes that I was talking about there.
Yep, sure. The first thing that we were going to talk about is bubonic plague. And this is the thing that most people talk about or think about when they think of the plague. So bubonic plague, there was actually about three different outbreaks of bubonic plague over history, even before the 14th century. But it was actually this plague at this point in time that actually had the most impact on the global population and travel also. The plague was actually spread via trade routes. So it actually started off in the Silk Road and actually moved from China all the way to Europe. And during this particular outbreak, there was about 60% of the European population wiped out. Another pinpoint in time for infectious disease outbreaks is actually the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
This had a devastating effect, and when we look at pandemics, Or epidemics, we need to really understand, as we've said previously, how humans are actually interacting with each other and the environment at the same time. And obviously, this is around the First World War. So at this point in time, people are actually moving, there's displaced individuals, there's refugees, there's soldiers returning to their homes, there's even migrant workers. And so, with this outbreak, what we did see was the travel of Of the actual infection moving along railroads. So migrant workers, for example, were from Spain and moving on to France at this point in time, but we also saw it actually being spread via ships as well.
And so that's why island countries like Samoa actually had a devastating effect with 25% of their population being wiped out during this epidemic pandemic. Okay, then we can come to another point, polio. Now, a lot of people uh talk to me about this and they actually say, Well, haven't we wiped out polio? No, we've not. Polio is a vaccine preventable disease. However, when we first saw the cases of this at the early 1900s, late 1800s, this was a time of great, again, movement of humans, but also increase in problems around the first world. War, we had the Great Depression, there were a lot of people living in high density situations as well. So we actually saw a number of people, or lots of people, and particularly children affected, who were infected with this, and it actually spread through the community quite rapidly.
Even to this day, we are still trying to eradicate polio. There are regions within the planet, so for the Western Pacific region of the globe, as As with the Southeast Asian region, we have eradicated polio.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What historical pandemics set the stage for understanding COVID‑19?
0:02–4:51
2
How did the bubonic plague and the 1918 Spanish flu illustrate disease spread via trade and war?
4:51–9:14
3
Why did polio persist despite early vaccine efforts and what lessons does it hold for modern outbreaks?
9:14–13:11
4
How do zoonotic jumps from wildlife to humans drive emerging diseases like SARS and MERS?
13:11–17:29
5
What role did the 2002‑2003 SARS outbreak play in shaping global pandemic response?
17:29–21:05
6
How did the 2014‑2016 Ebola crisis change vaccine development and emergency preparedness?
21:05–25:19
7
What is the ‘One Health’ approach and how does it help predict and prevent future pandemics?
25:19–29:32
8
How can individuals and societies act to reduce zoonotic risk and improve pandemic resilience?
29:32–33:54
Speakers
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