Review Article
Year: 2014 | Month: February | Volume: 4 | Issue: 2 | Pages: 165-169
A Historical Exploration of Pandemics of Some Selected Diseases in the World
Janmejaya Samal
Former District Epidemiologist, Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, Presently MPH Scholar, Padmashree School of Public Health (under RGUHS), Nagarbhavi Circle, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore, India.
ABSTRACT
A pandemic is an epidemic occurring on a scale which crosses international boundaries, usually affecting a large number of people. In a simple way a pandemic is an epidemic with higher magnitude in terms of geographical area, number of cases and days of suffering resulting in disabilities or deaths. Human population have suffered from many pandemics throughout history be it the earlier form of smallpox or tuberculosis or the recent incidence of HIV/AIDS or H1N1. It has created catastrophic damage in many different forms. Public health around the globe is improving by leaps and bound but the occurrence of a pandemic is not always unexpected. The epidemiological transition in different form may be one of the important factors for such incidents in and around the globe. In this paper an attempt has been made to explore historically some calendar of events of some selected pandemics around the globe.
Key words: Pandemic, Selected Disease, World