Pandemics Stage 5 PDF

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Illness and Medicine Text focus: Information Text Pandemics A pandemic occurs when an illness spreads across a whole country or the world. Throughout history, pandemics have swept across Britain, leaving its people terrified and, quite o en, deceased. Some of them are caused by il...

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Illness and Medicine Text focus: Information Text Pandemics A pandemic occurs when an illness spreads across a whole country or the world. Throughout history, pandemics have swept across Britain, leaving its people terrified and, quite o en, deceased. Some of them are caused by illnesses well-known to modern people, but others were caused by viruses or bacteria that thankfully are no longer around. Before the invention of antibiotics, people were incredibly vulnerable to pandemics. Britain suffered terrible a acks of various illnesses in 1832, 1837-38, 1848, 1854 and 1867. These were just the ones that spread over the entire country - there were also more localised, but equally deadly, outbreaks of various other illnesses. Let’s look at some of the things that have “plagued” Britain in the recent past. The plague The bubonic and pneumonic plague ravaged Europe many times during the medieval period and beyond. The Black Death spread across Europe between 1347 and 1351 and may have killed as many as 200 million people. People didn’t keep accurate records at the time, so the number of deaths is a best guess, but by any measure, it was the most deadly pandemic in human history. In some places, the death rate was 100%. Whole cities were wiped out, and it took nearly 300 years for the population of Britain to recover. Cholera Cholera was a particularly scary illness during the 18th century. One of the most terrifying things about cholera was how quickly it struck people down. The main symptoms were diarrhoea (which was far more concerning in a time without clean water), vomiting, cramps and headaches, and they o en came on in an instant. People regularly ate breakfast with a happy and well family member, only to have them die of cholera before evening. We now know that cholera is spread through infected water supplies, but at the time people had no idea. They were even more concerned because it seemed to affect rich people as well as the poor - something that they considered unfair! The cholera pandemic of 1832 killed 60,000 Britons. A pandemic in the 1850s killed 1 million people worldwide. Influenza Commonly known as the ‘flu, influenza tends to return to countries year a er year. In most years, it is deadly for a small number but otherwise tends to not affect populations too dramatically. Occasionally, all resources ©2020 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com this isn’t the case. In 1918, a strain of the ‘flu nicknamed the Spanish Flu spread across the world. In fact, it is highly unlikely that it originated in Spain. It was during the First World War, and most countries refused to report on the pandemic so that they didn’t seem weak. Spain hadn’t joined the war and so reported it freely. As a result, people began to associate it with the country, and even thought it was the only country suffering from it for a while. Wherever it began, the 1918 pandemic was the most deadly outbreak of ‘flu in modern times. It is estimated that 40% of the world’s population were infected in total, and roughly 50 million people died from it. To put that in perspective, the total number of soldiers killed during the First World War was around 17 million. Unlike most strains of the ‘flu which mainly affect the young and the elderly, the 1918 pandemic struck down younger, stronger people than anyone else. Nobody knows why it was so deadly or why it suddenly disappeared. Despite what some people believe, the ‘flu didn’t cause the end of the war. Coronavirus In 2019, a new pandemic spread across the world. A type of coronavirus (the same type of virus behind the common cold) nicknamed COVID-19 spread quickly and had reached almost all of the countries of the world within a few months. By November 2020, nearly 1.3 million people had died and entire countries had been forced to close down to help prevent the spread of the virus. Even with modern day medicine, humans remain at the mercy of pandemics. 1. What is a pandemic? VOCABULARY FOCUS 2. Which word in text tells you that the plague spread quickly through Europe causing death and destruction? 3. Find and copy a word in the text that means “thought that”. 4. Write a synonym for the word “originated”. 5. What does it mean that Spain reported on the ‘flu “freely”? R R S I R VIPERS QUESTIONS Which killed more people: the First World War or the 1918 ‘flu? How many people died from cholera in the 1850s? Why did people nickname the 1918 ‘flu, the Spanish Flu? Why were people so scared of cholera? What was the main way that cholera spread? all resources ©2020 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com