There could be a virus in your beer!

Reports from the Zwartkops Rowing Club – that ancient institution on the banks of the Swartkops River at Redhouse – indicate that the Corona Virus pandemic scare has had little effect on its sales of Corona beer. I thought this would be good news for Mexico, until I realised that the ZRC doesn’t stock the stuff.

Another venerable building, the Redhouse Village Hall, has a more direct connection to pandemics. In 1919 it was one of six hospitals in the area which handled cases of the Spanish Flu – a real pandemic which wiped out about half a million people in South Africa.

Under the watchful eye of Mrs. Sarah Toft and her staff of volunteer nurses, patients were nursed back to health under strict conditions of hygiene, encouraged by Mrs. Toft’s cure-all – a daily glass of champagne! To her great credit, she and her team of helpers never lost a single patient.

Concern for the spread of the virus is understandable, given the mounting toll of infections across Europe. On the other hand, Vietnam, which borders on China, has acted swiftly to contain the problem. It had only 16 cases, all of whom have been discharged from hospital and sent home.

The South African Dept. of Health appears to have acted with commendable speed in preparing for an outbreak. While it is difficult to imagine a South African government department being anything but incompetent and corrupt, we may just be lucky this time.

A pandemic is defined as the widespread occurrence of disease, in excess of what might normally be expected in a geographical region, whereas an epidemic is a disease confined to the area in which it originally arose. Ebola is an epidemic which occurs in West Africa. The Spanish Flu was a pandemic as it spread throughout the world.

I guess the semantics matter little to the poor sods who are infected.

While the world gets itself into a social media-fuelled panic about impending doom – and while it’s only right to take precautions, perhaps a review from a distance might put the issue into perspective.

Numerous pandemics have occurred over several thousand years. Of course, until recent times, medical science had not a clue what to do. It is also interesting that most of these pandemics seem to have originated in the Far East. Read on to see what your ancestors had to endure.

The Plague of Athens struck in 430 BC while the city was besieged by the Spartans. Scientists cannot say for sure but evidence available suggests that it may have been an outbreak of Ebola. Up to 100 000 citizens died. Strangely, the Spartans without the city wall were not affected. Athens ceased to be a major force in the area.

Soldiers returning to Rome from the Middle East in 165 AD brought with them what may have been measles. At about the same time, Chinese records show a similar outbreak. At least five million died in the Roman Empire in what became known as the Plague of Galen, a Greek doctor who recorded the event.

In 541 AD bubonic plague hit Europe. Evidence suggest that half the population of Europe succumbed. Constantinople lost 40 per cent of its citizens. Outbreaks of bubonic plague continued sporadically until about 750 AD, but then ceased until the Black Death event.

In 1347, the Black Death struck the Middle East and Europe. As usual, the scientists are at odds over exactly what diseases were involved. There seem to have been different strains, against all of which society was helpless.

And it didn’t go away. There were innumerable outbreaks in Europe between 1347 and 1671.

As an example, London was attacked 40 times between 1348 and 1665! A major outbreak occurred every 20 to 30 years, wiping out an estimated 20% of the city’s population each time.

The Great Plague of 1665 was particularly fearsome. Some say the Great Fire of London in 1666 may have prevented further outbreaks as it consumed such a large part of the sprawling city.

Then India produced the first of seven Cholera pandemics, the third of which killed one million people across the world between 1852 and 1860. As late as 1920-1911 the sixth pandemic claimed 800 000 lives, even though medical science had begun to understand the cause of the disease as due to contaminated water.

During 1890 and 1990 the Asiatic Flu raged around the world, claiming over a million victims, but by now medical science was learning fast.

But not fast enough. Between 1918 and 1920 a deadly flu bug struck. Previously, flu had taken the elderly or the very young or those with impaired immune systems. This version attacked healthy young adults, sparing the weak and infirm. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died, possibly more than the death toll of World War I (1914 to 1918).

In more modern times, we have had the Asian Flu, originating in China and killing two million people between 1956 and 1958 worldwide, followed in 1968 by another bout of flu which took one million lives, half of whom died in Hong Kong.

And of course, we have the ongoing HIV /AIDS pandemic, which has killed more than 36 million people since 1981.

And so to 2020, where the Corona Virus has already had a notable impact on world trade – spare a thought for those in the tourism industry – and has so far killed over 3000 people, not yet in the same league as the doleful list above.

This virus doesn’t spread anywhere near as fast as the panic virus carried via social media, and more people are likely to see their backsides in the mad rush to buy masks and antiseptic soap than actually succumb to the disease. Modern medical science is amazing and hopefully we will have an antidote sometime soon.

Meanwhile, if you are feeling fluey, you might try Mrs Toft’s champagne remedy!