CURRENT AFFAIRS

Detailed explanation-1: -Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist, and author of five books including The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris and The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria.

Detailed explanation-2: -Three worldwide (pandemic) outbreaks of influenza occurred in the 20th century: in 1918, 1957, and 1968. The latter 2 were in the era of modern virology and most thoroughly characterized. All 3 have been informally identified by their presumed sites of origin as Spanish, Asian, and Hong Kong influenza, respectively.

Detailed explanation-3: -According to the World Health Organization (WHO), stress has been classified as the health epidemic of the 21st century. What does this mean for Americans? The general level of worry and unhappiness in the modern world is creating a national epidemic of stress.

Detailed explanation-4: -The three great examples were smallpox, malaria and tuberculosis, each of which killed more people between 1900 and 1950 than the 80 million who died in both world wars. All these diseases had a global reach.

Detailed explanation-5: -The Russian flu that occurred between 1889 and 1893 was the first well-described pandemic (Taubenberger et al., 2007). This pandemic was possibly caused by an A/H3N8 virus based on serologic and epidemiologic data (Worobey et al., 2014).