McMillen: Pandemia – uma breve introdução

This book will introduce readers to the rich history of pandemic and epidemic disease and suggest that much of the way we confront such things now has been shaped by the past. This is an unremarkable statement but an important point. For very often history is forgotten or rediscovered only when we confront contemporary epidemics and pandemics, and thus patterns from the past are repeated thoughtlessly.

What are pandemics and epidemics? An epidemic is generally considered to be an unexpected, widespread rise in disease incidence at a given time. A pandemic is best thought of as a very large epidemic. Ebola in 2014 was by any measure an epidemic— perhaps even a pandemic. The influenza that killed fifty million people around the world in 1918 was a pandemic.

A common way to think about epidemics and pandemics is as events. They come and they go. But if we think about them this way, can we call HIV/AIDS a pandemic? Or tuberculosis? What about malaria? Pandemics can be either discrete events or what I would like to call persistent pandemics. Tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, which affect enormous swaths of the globe and kill millions and millions each year, are persistent pandemics.