Here's a small taste of it...
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The factors that influence the spread and/or limitations of
disease can often be quite unexpected, and in some cases, the causes remain
unknown.
The delivery of tea to England by fast ship may have
kept the English drinking tea, which constrained them to boil their water to
make the tea, which killed the bacteria that caused cholera and other diseases.
On the other hand, fast transport also caused some curious outbreaks of
disease.
Airport malaria is a known phenomenon today, where
people close to airports may very occasionally catch malaria when an infected
mosquito emerges from an aircraft and draws blood from somebody before it dies.
That sort of thing was far less likely in the days of steamships, but not
impossible, even with a sailing ship like the barque Hecla, which once carried yellow fever to Wales.
Hecla reached
Swansea with a cargo of copper ore from Cuba on 8 September 1865, and did not
raise the quarantine flag. The ship had left one crewman, dead of yellow fever
in Cuba, and she was under-crewed due to three deaths at sea that were put down
to yellow fever.
Another sailor, James Saunders, died just after landing,
and doctors judged this to be yellow fever, so his body was immediately buried
in a tar sheet, his house was cleared and disinfected with lime wash and
chloride of lime, and his clothing and bedding were destroyed.
Nobody had any idea that the disease was spread by
mosquito bites, so the ship’s water supply, almost certainly complete with
mosquitoes in all stages of life, was left unexamined. The ship’s owners
resisted moving the ship, and while it was disinfected, though it later moved after
locals intimated that it might mysteriously catch fire. This removal would have
had no effect on the mosquitoes, though the fire would have curtailed the
outbreak.
Before the outbreak ran its course, at least 27 people
fell ill with yellow fever and 15 of them died, while there were a few other “possibles”,
but how did a tropical disease reach Wales? Yellow fever and its mosquitoes had
travelled from Africa to the Caribbean with African slave ships and been
established there, but non-tropical Wales was safe from any permanent threat
from yellow fever, back then.
The ship travelled in warm weather that let the
mosquitoes survive, and it arrived in warm weather, which allowed the
mosquitoes to spread, briefly into parts of Swansea. Still, in these days of
global warming and climate change, who can say what the future might hold?
*
In China in the late 19th century, political unrest was
common, but new technology brought hope to some of China’s urban poor. They
could take steam trains into rural areas to shoot, kill and skin ground
rodents, and take the skins back to the city for sale. In an age before plastics,
skins were always saleable, and if the local people had silly traditions, like
not shooting a sick-looking animal, the city slickers saw those animals as fair
and easy game.
Bubonic plague is a disease that harms rodents, fleas
and humans. A flea bites an infected mammal, gets an infection that blocks its
bloodsucking apparatus, so the next time it tries to feed, some of the plague
bacteria “blow back” into the new food source, and so the disease spreads. When
a host dies, fleas move to any other warm body—like the person skinning the old
rodent host.
The hunters caught fast steam trains back to the city
before they fell ill, and from there, bubonic plague infected rats in the city,
either from the hunters or from fleas that were still in the fur of the skins.
Over time, some of the rats found their way onto fast steam ships that went
around the world from Chinese ports.
In earlier times, plague usually killed the rats before
sailing ships reached port, but steamships bustled from port to port, and
sooner or later, some of the rats made it to the other end, found their way
ashore to die, and shared their fleas and their ills. Indian ports were hit,
along with those in Sydney, San Francisco, Madagascar, Paraguay, South Africa
and more. In every port, people died because of fast ships.
*
There is fairly wide agreement that the spread of HIV was
brought about by long-haul truck drivers in Africa making use of prostitutes
along the way, followed by an entry into the more general population of the
western world, thanks to jet aircraft. The world got lucky with SARS.
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