Even in the midst of modern medical advancements, how will we deal with future microbial juggernauts?
Plague in history History records three great pandemics, (worldwide epidemics) in the past 2,500 years. Each ravished nearly the whole of the inhabited world. The first lasted for 200 years, the second for 400 and the third more than 100 years. The first began in the 15th year of the reign of Roman emperor Justinian I (ca. A.D. 542). It apparently first broke out in the Egyptian port of Pelusium, then spread to Byzantium (now Istanbul), probably aboard grain ships from Egypt. The Byzantine historian Procopius records the deadly march of the disease: “From [Egypt] it spread over the whole world, always moving forward and travelling at times favourable to it. For it seemed to move by fixed arrangement, and to tarry for a specified time in each country, casting its blight slightingly upon none, but spreading in either direction right out to the ends of the world, as if fearing lest some corner of the earth might escape it. For it left neither island nor cave nor mountain ridge which had h
