Coronavirus's ancestors: the plagues of Ancient Britain

Many epidemics must have afflicted Ancient Britain without leaving any mark on history. Perhaps the first that any historians speak of with any confidence came in AD 166 when Roman Britain, particularly London, may have been attacked by the Plague of Galen (named after the physician who described it), brought back by soldiers who had been fighting in the East.

It could have been smallpox or measles. No one is sure, but some historians believe it played a part in a major decline in London’s population, exacerbated by a great fire or a series of fires.

Nearly six centuries later, the ‘father of English history’, the Venerable Bede (pictured above), a monk in Jarrow, recorded a number of epidemics. Were they bubonic plague or some other disease? Again no one really knows.

Bede wrote of a sudden ‘severe plague’ falling on the Britons in 426-7. It ‘destroyed such numbers of them, that the living were scarcely sufficient to bury the dead.’ In 664, he says that ‘a sudden pestilence…..depopulated the southern coasts of Britain’ and then spread right up to Northumbria where it ‘ravaged the country far and near, and destroyed a great multitude of men.’

This was such a shock, according to Bede, that it helped to revive heathenism, as many ‘forsook the mysteries of the Christian faith and turned apostate’. The next year, pestilence ravaged Essex, and in 681, a ‘grievous mortality ran through many provinces of Britain’.

For more, see my book, A Disastrous History of Britain (The History Press).

Polio - a tale of two countries

India became officially free of polio last month. It is now three years since its last case was recorded. The health minister praised the efforts of more than two million vaccinators who had made this possible.

India had launched its anti-polio campaign in 1995. An important role was played by religious leaders who gave reassurance to people who were suspicious about the immunisations. The country now hopes to eradicate measles by 2020.

Over the border in Pakistan, it is a different story. Along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, it is one of the last three countries in the world where the disease is still endemic. Indeed, it is on the increase. The practice of murdering vaccination workers does not help.

Last month, three were killed in Karachi, as were six policemen on their way to guard the teams. Those who oppose the immunisation programme claim it is a Western plot to sterilise Muslims. Now India is worried that the disease my re-enter the country from Pakistan.

Measles - still a major killer

A global campaign has cut the number of deaths from measles dramatically, but they are still way above target, and every day, there are nearly 400 deaths from the illness.  

Back in 2000, 535,000 died every year.    By 2010, that total had fallen to 139,000 – a reduction of 74%, but the target had been to achieve a 90% drop.   Unicef says every death could have been prevented by vaccination. 

The campaign had been progressing well until 2007 when a vaccination programme stalled in India, with the authorities (perhaps distracted by the effort to eliminate polio) trying to make do with giving children just one injection to protect them when two were needed.   In addition, there were major outbreaks in southern Africa. 

A new combined vaccine against measles and rubella is being launched, with a new target of a further 95% drop in deaths from the 2000 level by 2015.   

*I was interviewed about the Titanic the other day by BBC Somerset.   It's posted here:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoCfD2kzNm8&list=HL1335275415&feature=mh_lolz

Native Americans

President Obama is holding the first ever conference for all of America’s native Indians. Delegates from all 564 tribes have been invited to the White House as the president promised them a better deal.

Estimates of the number of native Americans before the appearance of the white man range as high as 18 million. Then they were killed in wars or by being driven from their lands, but most of all by disease.

With no immunity to the infections brought from Europe, they died in their thousands, from chicken pox, smallpox, measles. In 1618, smallpox wiped out 90% of the Massachusetts Bay native Americans.

A century and a half later, the disease reached the northwest coast, and killed off 30% of the Indians there. In the Puget Sound area, a population of 37,000 was reduced to just 9,000, and epidemics continued on into the nineteenth century. Today, there are about 2 million Indians left in the United States and about 1 million in Canada.

Measles

Measles is on the increase again in Britain – with the number of cases in England and Wales rising from 990 in 2007 to at least 1,348 last year. The Health Protection Agency says the reason is that fewer people had their children vaccinated because of a scare, which most doctors now discount, over the MMR vaccine.

In 2006, a 13 year old boy became the first person to die from the virus in the UK in 14 years, and he had been taking an immunosuppressive drug. Across the world, though, the disease can be deadly and in 2007, the World Health Organisation said it had killed nearly 200,000. That in itself was a huge decrease from the figure for the year 2000 of 750,000.

As Europeans took over the world from the fifteenth century onwards, the measles virus was one of the deadliest weapons they carried with them. It was estimated to have killed two million Mexican Indians in the 1600’s, and it also cut a swath through the North American Indians. In 1847, the victims were the Cayuse Indians who lived in Oregon and Washington, and soon after they were defeated in war and confined to a reservation.

Between 1875 and 1911 three epidemics hit Fiji, after the virus was thought to have been brought to the islands by a leading local dignitary who had been to Australia to discuss handing them over to the British. The first and deadliest outbreak killed perhaps 40,000 out of a population of 150,000. The two later epidemics tended to kill young people who had been born since the previous visitation, and so had not acquired immunity.