Sonja Eliason and Bridget Alex investigate the characteristics of plague from an archaeological viewpoint, comparing how societies differed before and during the the granddaddy of them all, the Justinianic Plague, on The Conversation, and come to an unsurprising conclusion:
While encouraging economic and technological gains, urban development and trade created ideal conditions for an epidemic in Constantinople. Vulnerability to plague was an unintended consequence of this society’s lifestyle.
Meanwhile, it seems earlier cultures [that didn’t experience “over-congestion] unwittingly shielded themselves from the same threat.
The harsh reality is that it’s exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to control a pathogen, its possible mutations or its next outbreak. But understanding how human behaviors affect the spread and virulence of a disease can inform preparations for the future.
As a society, we can take organized measures to reduce the spread of infection, whether by limiting over-congestion, controlling food waste, or restricting access to contaminated areas. Human behaviors are just as critical to our disease susceptibility as are the characteristics of the pathogen itself.
Keep in mind that congestion will be a relative term, dependent on the characteristics of the pathogen under examination; the more infectious the pathogen, the lesser the necessary population density to qualify as congested.
We make unconscious tradeoffs when we centralize in cities: commerce of many kinds becomes much more efficient, but at the cost of disease and death for those who stumbled into the wrong situation, whether it be the cough of those already infected or the contaminated shared water source. Medicine has acted as the neutralizing agent since it came under modern scientific management, but rarely can medical researchers react quickly to a new pathogen; it’s only by luck that a medicine already through safety trials (or, worse, grand-daddied out of those trials!) can be successfully applied to a new pathogen.
And, of course, medicine is impotent when public health is not prioritized by those in power, as we’re beginning to vividly realize. In a way, the current … I cannot call it debate … dispute over whether the economy should be reopening even as multiple American states are experiencing novel coronavirus infection surges (click here to see the overall American contretemps) writes large the tradeoffs those people of so long ago experienced.
