Disease Profiles

• Headaches
• Delirium (severe confusion)
• Muscle aches
• Seizures
• Hepatitis 
• Decreased urination 
• Back pain
• High fever
• Loss of appetite
• Eye Redness
• Eye Sensitivity to light
• Mouth and nose bleeding
• Bradycardia (slowing of the heartbeat)
• Skin Jaundice (skin yellowing)
• Nausea and vomiting
• Abdominal pain

For many, many years, we had no way of fighting smallpox because we did not know enough about it or immunity. It spread quickly and spared no one, even infecting the Queen of England way back in the 1600s!

Before vaccines, people used to take the scabs of people who had smallpox and rub them on uninfected people! So gross!

But it actually would work somehow to prevent people from catching smallpox! This was not always safe as some people would actually catch smallpox from the scab instead.

Fun fact! – to “inoculate” means to teach to the immune system about a disease by inserting an immunologically active substance into the body, such as the scab above or a vaccine

But – this was the first time humanity figured out how we could use help our immune systems recognize a disease before becoming infected. This understanding would later be used to make the first vaccine!

• Rash that develops fluid filled blisters that eventually scab over
• Fever
• Tiredness 
• Headaches
• Loss of appetite

Since polio was endemic so most people caught it throughout most of its history, we did not really fight it and did not have many treatments. Once polio began to become more of a concern in the early 1900s, a mad dash occurred to come up with treatments, most being ineffective. One remedy included electrifying the lower legs to allow oxygen to flow more freely, giving baths in almond meal, rubbing mustard or some other random substance on the individual, and having the afflicted drink radioactive radium water, among other ineffective liquids. Of course, these had no affect and even hastened death in some cases (Gould, T. 1995).

While most therapies explored in these times proved ineffective, some effective measures were discovered. These included the iron lung to aid with breathing, a treatment regimen, and an anti-polio antibody serum (Hammon, W., 1955). With the serum, William Hammon in 1950 was able to isolate a liquid with antibodies against the poliovirus from the blood of polio survivors. However, the most effective treatment was preventative in the form of a vaccine!

Preventing measles was incredibly difficult due to its extremely high infectiousness. Prior to 1963, practically all children got measles with around 3 to 4 million people in the USA infected each year (History of Measles | CDC, n.d.). It was very difficult to control, prevent, and treat measles up until the mid-1900s when better medical treatments became available (Najera, 2019). Some groups including the severely malnourished and young children are given vitamin A due to its ability to act as an immunomodulator that boosts the antibody response to measles, decreasing risk of serious complications (Bester, 2016).

Like many diseases, quarantine was used to prevent the spread of influenza. Unfortunately, this was not that effective for preventing spread because the infectious stage of influenza begins before the individual develops symptoms, making it very hard to tell who needs to be quarantined until it is too late (Miksanek, 2007). In the case of influenza quarantines, it is mostly done as a way to reassure the public that some action is being taken. Face masks are another measure famously used during influenza outbreaks. In San Fransisco during the Spanish flu, people were regularly jailed for not wearing face masks (Miksanek, 2007).

• Warts on the genitals
• Leads to Cervical Cancer
• Sometimes completely asymptomatic (no visible or detectable symptoms)

The Incorrect Miasma Theory of Disease

For years nobody knew how cholera spread. Originally, we believed in The Miasma Theory of Disease. It was thought that miasma – which is bad air – caused cholera. This miasma was thought to have come from the soil. So we tried to fight it by cleaning the air, providing good food, and encouraging good moral character. The moral character part is because people are superstitious, and often think that those who behave poorly got bad karma in catching cholera. This is all incorrect, and it turns out cholera is actually spread through germs.

Contact Tracing

In London 1854, a physician named John Snow came along and managed to find out where a cholera outbreak in a town was originating from. This was pretty revolutionary because he did not understand how cholera spread, but it did not matter. He invented contact tracing, which is used widely today to trace COVID outbreaks! Click here to learn more and play the contact tracing scavenger hunt!

A Major Breakthrough – The Germ Theory of Disease

Fast forward to 1883, along comes the invention of the microscope and a scientist named Robert Koch. With the microscope, he took a sample of contaminated water and he discovered a wiggly little guy that he called “vibrio cholerae”.

Fun fact! – “vibrio cholerae” literally translates to ‘I vibrate’, as Robert Koch saw them wiggling around under his microscope. Cool, right?

By isolating the microorganism, he was able to test whether it caused the disease cholera. This was done with what is now known as Koch’s postulates, which are used still for many other diseases like COVID-19 to find out their causes. Koch’s postulates were also used to figure out what caused Yellow Fever and Malaria.

This lead to the development of The Germ Theory of Disease to replace the miasma theory. This is the correct idea that infectious diseases are caused by small, practically invisible organisms such as virus’s, bacteria, and others. These organisms invade the body and reproduce using the bodies resources, with the goal of spreading to other people.

Koch was celebrated as a hero, as now we could change our systems to virtually remove chance of cholera infection in developed areas. Modern plumbing was developed, including the toilet, with sanitary systems now in place to cleanse all contaminated water before releasing it to the environment

People are Resistant to Change – The Stubborn Scientist Who Drank Cholera

Unfortunately, not everyone was super excited and resisted the positive change brought on by Robert Koch.

Max von Pettenkofer was a scientist who did a lot of his life work on The Miasma Theory of Disease. Understandably, he was upset that most of his work may become meaningless and so he refused to believe Robert Koch was correct.

Max was so unconvinced that he asked Robert to send him a sample of cholera, and then Max DRANK the sample! He drank millions of cholera bacteria to try and prove his point!

Max then wrote to Robert that he survived, shocking Robert because the sample he sent did indeed have the dangerous cholera bacteria in it. Why did he survive, then?

Robert actually had a bad case of cholera years earlier and this likely provided him with some immunity to the bacteria so he did not die upon drinking the cholera sample. In addition to this, some sources say Max actually did have a bad case of diarrhea after drinking the sample, although he would never admit this because he would never admit that Robert was right.

Quarantine

Plague was notoriously difficult to control, and we did not have many means to fight it. Quarantine – isolating those infected – was essentially invented because of the bubonic plague. Despite not knowing how the disease spread, there was a recognition that association with infected individuals often resulted in spread of the disease as far back as the 100’s (Miksanek, 2007).

Fun fact! – “quarantine” comes from the Italian words quaranto giorni and refers to the 40-day period in which ships were required to remain in isolation upon arrival to a port.

While individuals on ships would isolate in ports, often resulting in 90% of the ship’s population dying from the disease, the most important set of individuals would not isolate – rats! Rats do not respect any man-made limitations, and since they carried the plague-infected fleas, it was easy for the rats to make it into the city and spread bubonic plague (Miksanek, 2007).

Sometimes cities would impose household quarantines. The city would require any households with infected individuals to completely shut their doors. The uninfected would then become infected from plague-infested rats, and these rats would come and go from the house, too. Thus, it did not result in lower infection rates but instead higher mortality (Miksanek, 2007).

Current Day

In the present day, there is little concern for a plague pandemic to ever occur. Biological warfare remains a risk, however. Plague can be turned into a mist form and released as an aerosol, with even just a few bacteria being sufficient to infect people.

If a bubonic plague outbreak ever occurred, we now have antibiotics which can reduce fatality significantly. The normal fatality rate of bubonic plague is 66%; when treated with antibiotics, this reduces to just 13% (Nelson et al., 2021).

Among infectious diseases, pneumonia was the deadliest during the early 1900s and the third largest cause of death overall (Pneumonia History, n.d.). Like many diseases at the time, major breakthroughs in understanding how diseases spread and what they looked like were occurring, and so advances in treating pneumonia was occurring, too. One new technique that was developed in 1913 was an anti-pneumococcal serum therapy. This serum was able to reduce mortality from 25% to 7.5% if given early enough in the disease progression, although this treatment was time-consuming and costly. The first antibacterial agent called sulfapyridine was developed in the 1930s and it was used to treat the famous Winston Churchill’s bacterial pneumonia in 1942, making it gain notoriety fairly quickly. This fame was short lived, however, as the antibiotic penicilin was discovered in the early 1940s, and antibiotics are extremely effective in killing the bacteria that cause infections like pneumococcal (Pneumonia History, n.d.).