Chapter 1
Pandemics Pandemics are epidemics that cross national or international boundaries and affect great numbers of people. In other words, a whole lot of people living in a wide area have all been infected with the same disease. This isn’t just a case of the sniffles running rampant through a school district. For many people, the first thing that comes to mind when discussing pandemics is the Black Death, sometimes called the Black Plague. While it is impossible to cite an exact death toll, historians believe the Black Death claimed up to 200 million lives from roughly 1347 to 1350. In just three years, it decimated up to 60 percent of the entire population of Europe. This pandemic of the bubonic plague originated in or near China and spread over the Silk Road to Europe. Fleas, carried on the backs of rats that infested all the merchant ships, helped spread the disease everywhere they went. Take a moment and let those numbers sink in a bit. About 200 million people perished as a result of the disease. To put that into perspective, in 2012 the estimated population of the United States was roughly 314 million people. Can you even imagine what life would be like if two-thirds of the US population all died within a few years? How long do you think it would take for life to return to anything close to normal? According to some experts, it took Europe about 150 years to get back on its feet. A more recent example is the flu pandemic that occurred in 1918–1919, during World War I. This was the first major outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus. It is sometimes referred to as the Spanish flu, only because of the distorted news reports back then. Government censors worked hard to keep wartime morale up by not allowing much negative news to hit the airwaves. (I know, that would never happen today.) So, as the early reports came in about the spread of the deadly flu in the countries at war, these censors did what they could to keep it hushed up. Spain, however, was neutral during the war and didn’t bother keeping things quiet. The result was that news reports seemed to indicate Spain was being hit harder by this flu than the rest of the world, hence the name Spanish flu. What was particularly chilling about this flu outbreak was how it targeted healthy segments of the population. The deaths were not centered among the elderly, the infirm, and children; rather, it was the strapping young adults who were hardest hit. This was due to how the flu virus worked, by causing what’s called a cytokine storm in the body. Essentially, the virus would send the patient’s immune system into overdrive. The healthier the patient was at the outset, the more powerful the body’s immune response, resulting in a cytokine storm of such force that it killed the patient. This flu pandemic hit just about every corner of the planet. While numbers are still sketchy, estimated death tolls range from fifty to one hundred million. No matter how you look at it, that’s a lot of dead bodies, but bear in mind that most of them perished within a nine-month period. Could something like that happen today? I mean, with all our modern medical knowledge and advanced technology, surely the powers that be would act quickly to stop the infectious disease before it got out of control, right? Think about this, though: HIV/AIDS has been around since 1981, and they still haven’t found a cure for it. Famine Famine is defined as a widespread lack of food, causing a sharp increase in fatalities on a regional level. Basically, something causes crop failure or in some other way limits the amount of available food in a given area over a period of time. For example, a long-term drought could result in a significant lack of food crops being available. Famine could also result from political upheavals, as when an oppressive government negatively affects food distribution. Occasionally, both natural and political factors can combine, causing something akin to a perfect storm of food shortages. In July 1995, a series of massive floods occurred in North Korea. The floodwaters utterly destroyed crops, arable land, and, perhaps most importantly, emergency grain reserves. Given the already tumultuous political climate and declining economy, North Korea didn’t have the capability to bring in resources from outside the country. While precise figures may never be known due to the lack of reliable information coming out of North Korea even today, estimates range up to three million deaths directly attributable to the famine. One of the most well-known famines is the Irish Potato Famine. From 1845 to 1852, approximately one million people died in Ireland as a result of a potato blight that wiped out the primary source of food. Another million or so people managed to flee the country. Between the famine deaths and the mass exodus, the overall population of Ireland dipped by about 20 to 25 percent during this period. At the time, roughly 30 percent of the population were entirely dependent upon the potato for food. Further, most of them relied on a single variety of potato, called the Irish Lumper. Because of the lack of genetic diversity among the crops, the blight was particularly devastating. It wasn’t just starvation that killed people during the Irish Potato Famine, nor in any other famine. As people starve, their immune systems begin to falter. This, coupled with the gradual lack of services providing medical care, clean water, and other necessities, causes significant outbreaks of disease. We may live in a nation of plenty right now, but what if the ever-changing climate were to take a turn for the worst and cause massive crop failures? The domino effect from even one or two bad seasons could send the country into a tailspin. Economic Collapse Of the various types of long-term disasters, perhaps the most difficult to define is economic collapse. Many situations would fall under this umbrella, such as hyperinflation or a lengthy economic depression resulting in mass bankruptcies and high unemployment. No matter the cause, one thing almost all economic collapses have in common is mass civil unrest. In 1998, Russia experienced an economic collapse that resulted in bank closures and mass runs on basic commodities. Inflation rose to about 84 percent. By comparison, the United States currently averages around 1.6 percent inflation. Prices for food went up almost 100 percent, while at the same time the ruble decreased in value. Millions of people saw their entire life savings disappear as banks failed. Those Russians living in urban areas were the worst off. With no homegrown crops to sustain them, they were forced to stand in long lines for the most meager of supplies. The elderly living on pensions suddenly found the much-needed money completely cut off. Hospitals were also affected, seeing massive reductions in already scarce drug supplies. While the Russian economy did rebound rather quickly due to rising oil prices the following year, I don’t think they are out of the woods completely, even today. Around this same time, Argentina experienced its own collapse. After several years of economic instability, including at least two bouts of hyperinflation, the bottom finally fell out in 2001. By the end of that year, unemployment had risen to about 20 percent. As a result of people pulling their pesos from the bank, converting them to dollars, and then sending them abroad, the government froze bank accounts for twelve months, allowing only very small withdrawals each week. This measure naturally did not go over very well, and people took to the streets to protest. While many of these demonstrations started out peacefully enough, albeit loud, they were soon accompanied by property damage and violence. It took several years before anything that could be called recovery began to take place. What would you do if the government suddenly froze your bank account? What if what little money you could scrounge was all but worthless? Freak Occurrences Things like economic collapse and pandemics don’t typically happen overnight. There is usually a chain of events, though perhaps imperceptible at the time, that takes us from Point A to Point B and on down the line. However, history has also witnessed events that occurred so suddenly and had such long-ranging effects, it is almost mind-boggling.
