Word: cholerae
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This year, with a budget of $7 million to maintain order, Indian authorities have erected control towers so that they can survey the milling crowds and prevent disasters like the 1954 stampede in which 513 people died. They have ordered that all pilgrims must be inoculated against cholera, and 1,000 workers have been assigned just to spray antiseptics. Beggars have been banned. All day and all night blaring hymns on the loudspeaker system are interrupted by announcements about missing people (2,000 of them...
...floating imagination. He sets young Hubert's struggle to stay unmutilated against a background of intriguing conjectures and sly jokes. Europe is ruled directly from the Vatican (Pope John XXIV is a stout-swilling Englishman given to reminding his visitors that "we are the Holy Father"). Plague and cholera still ravage its citizens because ecclesiastical authorities have hamstrung medicine and banned science altogether. Jean-Paul Sartre is a French Jesuit. Children read books like St. Lemuel's Travels and "a collection of Father Bond stories." The entire canon of William Shakespeare was proscribed during his lifetime and most...
Antibiotics and vaccines have reduced many an ancient malady to little more than a memory. Onetime killers like measles and chicken pox have been downgraded into childhood diseases capable of producing lasting immunities in their survivors. Inoculation and modern sanitation have all but eliminated smallpox. Cholera remains endemic only on the Indian subcontinent. But, McNeill concludes, "knowledge and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life." Microbes have already shown that they are more flexible than man, and can move easily from animal hosts into humans. The swine flu virus seems...
Until such bold adventurers as Verrazano and Hudson penetrated its unpolluted waters, North America enjoyed extraordinary freedom from epidemics. In pre-Columbian times there had been no plague (Black Death), cholera, yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria or even measles...
Average life expectancy at birth was 34.5 years for men and 36.5 years for women. Fifty percent of deaths occurred in those under ten years of age. Infectious diseases decimated the population. Smallpox and yellow fever were most feared. Tuberculosis, cholera and dysentery, typhoid, diphtheria, measles and mumps were ever present. Malaria was as common in New England as on the Southern plantations. In 1721, almost half the population of Boston caught smallpox, and more than 7% died. Yellow fever wiped out 10% of the population of Philadelphia...