I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying theĀ causes and processes ofĀ illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
First, it’s important to understand the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic. An epidemic is a diseases where infection rates are significantly higher than what would normally be expected from that disease in that population.
A pandemic is a epidemic that has been spread across a large region, usually multiple continents. Some examples are HIV/AIDS, influenza, smallpox and malaria. To be classified as a true pandemic, the disease must not only kill many people, and be spread over a large area, it must also be infectious. Cancer is a good example of this: even though it kills lots of people, and is very widespread, it is not pandemic, because most are not contagious.
Lots of things can contribute to something becoming a pandemic. Diseases that are resistance to antibiotics or antivirals are considered risks of growing into pandemics. Highly contagious diseases, which have multiple ways of infecting someone would be more likely candidates, as are diseases which can move between species. An example is the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, which is thought to have killed up to a third of the population across Europe in the 14th Century. It was a very large pandemic, which was carried by fleas. The fleas would become infected, and bite humans, who would then get the disease. These infected fleas would hitch rides with rats, which lived close around humans or would climb on to ships bound for far away places. The rats would then leave the ship, the fleas would jump off and infect people in this new place, and the disease spread. The people were also contagious, so it spread between people, as well as being carried by the fleas.
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the dictionary states
pandemic: disease prevalent over a whole country or the world
epidemic: a widespread occurrence of a disease in a community at a particular time
I think when we lose control of a disease and it spreads throughout a whole country or world, that’s when we call it a pandemic. There’s only so much we can do as scientists and we don’t have a cure for everything.
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Vanessa did a really nice job of addressing this, and I’d only add a detail or two to her answer. Some diseases, like the flu, are locked in a war with the human immune system. These viruses are constantly changing, trying to slip past the defenses of the immune system, like tiny barbarians at the walls of a castle. Mostly, the virus manages to change enough to keep circulating each year and cause a new epidemic but not enough to cause a pandemic (as Vanessa outlined). In flu, this process is called ‘antigenic drift’. But sometimes, the flu manages to catch on to a new strategy that the body isn’t prepared for at all (often because it picks up ideas from flu strains circulating in other animals such as pigs or domestic fowl like chickens and ducks). Now the virus has found a way to batter down the gates or tunnel under the walls or sneak in the back, and it can flood in. This is called ‘antigenic shift’, and it can lead to pandemics like Vanessa describes. The Spanish flu in 1918 that you may have learned about in history became pandemic for this reason and killed more people than died in the whole of World War I, about 50-100 million.
This back and forth between the flu and the human immune system is more common in small viruses like the flu that change very quickly and cause acute infections (infections that generally start quickly and have a short course). There’s other variables, too, but I won’t bore you to tears here. š
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