World War II, in which the German army deliberately caused malaria epidemics and the Japanese experimented with anthrax and plague as biological weapons, created new fears. Since “Spanish” flu burst from the trenches of World War I in 1918, infecting 20 percent of the world’s population and killing upward of 50 million people, fears of a similar pandemic have preoccupied public health practitioners, politicians, and philanthropists. Epidemics-localized outbreaks of diseases-have always been part of human history, but pandemics require a minimum density of population and an effective means of transport. The word itself, a neologism from Greek words for “all” and “people,” has been used only since the mid-nineteenth century. Pandemics-the uncontrolled spread of highly contagious diseases across countries and continents-are a modern phenomenon. A health worker marking a child who has been given a polio vaccination, Aleppo, Syria, May 2014
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