The new coronavirus discovered in China in December 2019 continues to progress in countries of the world and the number of cases is increasing over the hours, especially in France. Is the pandemic near? What is it concretely and what difference with an epidemic?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), we speak of a pandemic in the event of a worldwide spread of a new disease. For example, an influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears and spreads worldwide. The vast majority of the population is not immune to this new virus, its impact and severity are potentially higher than in the case of an already known virus. “If a high percentage of the population is infected, even if the proportion of infected individuals contracting a severe form is small, the total number of severe cases may become relatively large.“, details the institution on its website.
A pandemic extends to a continent, even to the whole world.
Difficult to grasp the nuance between epidemic and pandemic. The main difference is the geographic extent of an infectious disease. A epidemic (Latin epidemia which means “at home“) corresponds to the development and rapid spread of a contagious disease, most often of infectious origin, in a large number of people. The epidemic would therefore be limited to a well-defined region, country or area.
On the other hand, a pandemic (of Greek pan which means “everything” and demos which means “people”) East an epidemic with several outbreaks. The pandemic spreads to the entire population of a continent, even to the whole world. Its impact and severity (number of contaminations and death rate) are therefore greater than those of an epidemic.
At the moment, there is only one official home: Wuhan in China.
Despite the thousands of infections and deaths from the new Chinese coronavirus, WHO is not yet talking about a “pandemic”, because for the moment, there is only one official focus, that of Wuhan in China, where the epidemic called “Covid-19” appeared. There are other countries affected by the epidemic, but they are not currently considered to be outbreaks. This does not prevent the risk of a pandemic from increasing with the presence of the virus in more than 70 countries of the world and the development of risk areas outside of China, especially in Iran, South Korea and Italy. If these areas become true hotbeds of the epidemic, the WHO will certainly announce the pandemic. For the moment, “we have to focus on containment (see diagram below) while doing everything we can to prepare for a possible pandemic“, said the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on February 24, 2020 at a press conference in Geneva.
A country’s strategy to curb the introduction of the virus into the territory, detect and care for infected people
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When WHO officially declares the pandemic stage, its 196 Member States must respect the International Health Regulations (IHR). This is’a deal which obliges WHO Member States to collaborate for global health security. Concretely, these countries commit to strengthening their capacities in the detection, evaluation and notification of public health events. And also to implement special measures at ports, airports and border crossings (supervised places of passage between two countries) to limit the spread of the virus. This can consist, for example, of ordering medical equipment, making restrictions on transport, mobilizing a health reserve, closing certain public places, storing vaccines, building hospitals…
- The black plague pandemic, caused by bacteria Yersinia pestis has been rampant in Asia, the Middle East, the Maghreb and Europe. It was declared for the first time in 1334 in the province of Hubei in China. From 1347 to 1352, black plague made 25 million victims in Europe, which corresponds to around half of the European population at the time and 25 million dead in the rest of the world, especially in China, India, Egypt, Persia and Syria. Black plague is mainly transmitted by lice, flea bites and rats.
- Spanish flu, a disease caused by a particularly violent type A H1N1 strain, is a pandemic that has infected more than a third of the world’s population between 1918 and 1919. According to the Institut Pasteur, it killed more than 50 million people, 5 times more than during the battles of the First World War. Very few regions in the world have escaped this pandemic.
- Since 1981, AIDS, caused by the HIV virus, caused 32 million dead worldwide, says the Joint United Nations Program on HIV / AIDS (UNAIDS). The AIDS pandemic began in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the years 1920, before spreading to the whole world.
- Cholera, acute diarrheal disease caused by ingestion of the bacteria Vibrio cholerae, appeared in 1817. The first cholera pandemic (1817-1824) hit the whole of the Far East, East Africa and Asia Minor. The current pandemic (the seventh) started in South Asia, in 1961, reached Africa in 1971, then the American continent in 1991. In total, there are 7 cholera pandemics that have killed and are still killing today of millions of people. According to the WHO, there will be between 1.3 and 4 million cases of cholera each year and nearly 143,000 deaths from the disease worldwide.
- Smallpox, an acute contagious disease caused by the variola virus, has killed nearly 50 million people worldwide each year, between the beginning of the years 1950 and the early 1970s. There were between 300 and 500 million victims during the 20th century. Thanks to global vaccination campaigns, smallpox was eradicated in 1980, according to the WHO. It is the first disease to have been fought with concerted and targeted actions on a global scale.
Sources:
- Article “What is the International Health Regulations?”, 2016, WHO site
- Article “What is a pandemic?”, 2010, WHO site
- Monitoring and surveillance during the influenza A (H1N1) 2009 pandemic: review of the Institute for Health Surveillance (InVS)
- Methodological guide, Ministry of Solidarity and Health, February 20, 2020
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