History of Medicine

Although we have come to associate COVID-19 with many negatives-  school closures,   quarantine, social distancing, and travel restrictions to name a few- it has also provided a boost for science, particularly in the area of vaccine research. The pandemic of historical proportions has triggered a global race to develop a vaccine against the virus. The development of a new vaccine typically takes 10-15 years, a luxury the world can ill afford right now. So companies around the world are racing to find a solution in record time. This has led to the development of an entirely new type of vaccine called mRNA or messenger RNA vaccine. mRNA vaccines are not a new concept; they have been known for a few decades but have not been developed seriously until now. mRNAs are tiny pieces of genetic code that tell cells in our bodies to make a protein.  The two companies at the forefront of vaccine development, Pfizer and Moderna, are both using mRNAs to develop a vaccine. They both use synthetic mRN

Getting back to the topic of using traditional medicines against COVID, which I wrote about earlier, it seems now the World Health Organization (WHO) is also endorsing its use, or at least considering it. On September 19, the WHO formally endorsed a protocol for testing herbal medicines as potential treatments for the coronavirus and other epidemics. The endorsement was specifically aimed at testing African herbal medicines, but the same should apply to all herbal medicines used around the world. A statement by the WHO director read, "The onset of COVID-19, like the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, has highlighted the need for strengthened health systems and accelerated research and development programmes, including on traditional medicines." The move seems to be in response to some African countries using and selling herbal remedies for treating COVID. The most prominent one is a drink called COVID-Organics or CVO, which is being sold widely in Madagascar, with their President

As we ponder the consequences of the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is interesting to look back at history, which is riddled with pandemics with staggering death tolls. I thought it would be worthwhile to compare the effects of historical pandemics with the current one for some perspective. While the effects of the current pandemic are certainly shocking, it was shocking to discover that other pandemics were even more devastating with some like the plague claiming tens of millions of lives. The infographic below offers a great visual representation of the death toll of past pandemics and helps provide a good perspective on how each pandemic compares with others and also to the pandemic we face today. Death Toll of Various Pandemics. Image: Visual Capitalist   The tragic loss of human life is an obvious consequence of a pandemic, but there are also other fallouts that are less well known but equally important in the context of history. Looking at pandemics of the ancient worl

As the possibility of a major coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. turns to reality, I figured it would be useful to do more research into the history and evolution of the family of viruses that coronavirus belongs to— influenza. One of the oldest diseases in mankind’s history dating back 2400 years, the flu is caused by the influenza virus, which was isolated only in the 1930s after the  1918 Spanish flu, the  biggest flu pandemic in history. This pandemic killed over half a million people in the United States and around 50 million (some estimates are as high as 100 million) worldwide. The Spanish flu had a mortality rate between 2-20% and it lowered the average life expectancy of the American population by more than 12 years. Compared to that flu outbreak, the current coronavirus pandemic pales in significance, surely thanks to our current knowledge of epidemiology and the proactive measures taken by governments to curb the spread of the virus, rather than any change in the lethal nature

With the recent fear of a coronavirus outbreak, I thought it would be interesting to trace the history of infectious diseases. Infectious diseases date back to the ancient civilizations. The earliest reference to influenza, which the coronavirus is a form of, came from none other than the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates. As early as 412 B.C.,  Hippocrates described a highly contagious disease with flu-like symptoms afflicting residents of Perinthus in northern Greece. It is the first known influenza epidemic in history. The name, influenza , came much later in 1357 AD, when people in Florence named the epidemic “influenza di freddo”, or influence of cold. Infections spread quickly and widely in the ancient world, and influenza was certainly not the first epidemic in history. The Great Plague of Athens in 430-426 BC, caused by an outbreak of typhoid and other diseases, is the earliest known major epidemic. The outbreak came in the middle of the Peloponnesian War between the S