Page 200 - Encyclopedia Of World History

550 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Indoor plumbing and underground
sewage systems were enormous public
health advances that helped control the
spread of disease in dense, urban centers.

through, comparable to the sanitary successes of the nine-
teenth century, came after World War II. Suddenly, use of
DDT to poison mosquito larvae almost eliminated
malaria from many regions of the earth, while penicillin
and Mexico. Even more important, cholera established and other antibiotics became generally available to kill
itself in Mecca in 1831, where it infected Muslim pil- other infections.All at once, instant cures for ancient dis-
grims. They in turn carried it home with them, periodi- eases became a matter of course. On the prevention side,
cally spreading cholera all the way from Mindanao to the World Health Organization carried out a successful
Morocco until 1912. Then cholera disappeared from campaign that eliminated (with the exception of labora-
Mecca, and Muslim pilgrims ceased to spread it far and tory specimens) smallpox from the earth in 1976. Yet
wide; but it lived on in India, where Hindu pilgrims con- these triumphs did not last very long. While effective
tinued to be its principal carriers. against mosquitoes, DDT also poisoned so many forms
European and American responses to this dread infec- of life that its use soon had to be abandoned. More gen-
tion were strenuous indeed. Reformers in England set out erally, infectious agents began to develop resistances to
to reengineer the water supply and sewer systems of Lon- the new antibiotics. As a result, malaria reclaimed some
don and other cities to assure germ-free drinking water. of its old importance, and other ancient infections did
It took years to build new water systems, but as they likewise.
spread from city to city, many other sorts of infections Then when AIDS was recognized in 1981 and suc-
diminished sharply. Helped by vaccination against small- cessfully resisted chemical cures, doctors, once so confi-
pox, dating back to the eighteenth century, cities became dent of victory over infections, had to admit that their
far more healthful than before. This sanitary effort new skills had unexpected limitations. Infections were
involved new laws and medical boards of health with coming back, and diseases of old age were increasing.All
mandatory power to enforce preventive measures. It was too obviously, and despite all the recent medical marvels,
the first great medical breakthrough of modem times. Bit human bodies remain subject to infection and degener-
by bit, vaccination and sanitation spread around much of ate with age.
the globe, changing human experience of infectious dis- Diseases change, and have always done so. Human
ease so fundamentally that we have difficulty imagining behavior changes too, affecting how diseases afflict us.
times when infant death was a matter of course and Since 1750 or thereabouts, medical knowledge and prac-
adults died of infections more often than from degener- tice drastically altered the global disease regime and
ative diseases of old age. lengthened human life for billions of persons. But all our
Yet some diseases were little affected by these preven- skills do not change the fact that we remain part of the
tive measures.The viruses that cause influenza, for exam- web of life on Earth, eating and being eaten, everywhere
ple, varying from year to year, regularly find receptive and always.
human hosts whose immunities from previous years are
William H. McNeill
ineffective against the new variants. In 1918–1919 a new
strain of the virus proved particularly lethal, killing about See also AIDS; Disease and Nutrition; Diseases,Animal;
20 million persons as it spread around the world, which Diseases, Plant; Malaria
made it far more deadly than World War I.Yet, as so often
before, survivors soon almost forgot about their
Further Reading
encounter with such a lethal epidemic.
Cook, N. D. (1998). Born to die: Disease and the New World conquest,
That was partly because a second medical break- 1492–1650. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.