Pandemics get the headlines. Fair enough; it’s the pandemics often kill millions, potentially billions. But in a sense, pandemic, epidemic, and endemic diseases are equally bad. Why? As they say about all wars being the same size: Death comes one to the customer.
An All Too True Story
This fall, a friend of mine took her kids hiking at a state park. They apparently walked through a nest of “seed ticks”. That’s the local name for the pinhead-sized nymph stage. Each of them got more than a hundred bites. Yuk.
A few days later they all had some fever, aches, generally ill health. The kids recovered with a course of antibiotics. My friend did not. Her condition worsened over the course of a month to a full-on neurological disorder. At this time, she’s using a walker to get around.
Not the makings of heroic prepper fiction, I admit. But it could easily be the real story of a bug-out.
What’s the difference between pandemics, epidemics, and endemics?
Technically, the difference between a pandemics and epidemics is size. Epidemics are when a lot of cases of a particular disease occur in a limited area. San Francisco may have a measles epidemic while Sacremento has no cases. Pandemics occur when disease spreads through a much wider area. When many countries have a spike in cases in a short time frame, that’s a pandemic.
Endemic diseases are those that keep recurring in a particular area. The Black Plague is endemic in the American Southwest region because a dozen or two cases a year occur there.
More importantly, why is the difference?
I’m a science person, and definitions don’t give us warm fuzzies. We of all people Know those words are just made up anyway. A lot of them are made up by …us. We want to know why different patterns exist. It matters. “Whys” let you predict.
One why for the difference between pandemics, epidemics, and endemics is how they spread. If a microbe yearns to cause a pandemic, it must learn to spread very efficiently from person to person. The fewer of the microbes it takes to infect the next person, the better … for the microbe. Other helpful pandemic-producing traits include having a symptom-free incubation period that lets you spread and an ability to survive for awhile outside a host. A taste for vacationing on doorknobs is great.
If there’s a pandemic, a whole lot of people are going to getting the disease. That’s a lot of people are at risk. It also means that limiting interpersonal contact will help; and that someone appearing well is no guarantee of being disease-free.
Epidemics may just be bouncing baby pandemics
Pandemics all start out as epidemics. Sometimes the only difference between the two is timing. The disease starts as an outbreak, very local. It spreads to a middling geographic area and becomes an epidemic. If it spreads worldwide (thanks, air travel!) it’s a pandemic.
Air travel is a pandemic’s best friend. People disperse before they’re obviously sick.
Not all epidemics become pandemics. Sometimes that germ gets off the plane and can’t stand the local climate. Sometimes the vector the disease needs to spread can’t establish in distant regions. Or maybe it’s only a middling clever microbe and by the time it spreads that far people have figured out how to stop it.
Risk of epidemic disease depends a lot on where you are. Cohabit in a city in the epidemic area and the risk profile’s no better than for a pandemic.
Endemics are locals. They live there.
Endemics are local risks. If they’re microbe diseases, they typically have an “animal reservoir”. That’s one or more species of local animals that also carries the microbe. Often that microbe and the animal species have co-evolved to get along. The microbe no longer makes the animal sick, but it multiplies within the beast and can be spread from it.
These suckers represent way more risk to me than some AK-wielding biker gang.
Endemic diseases that don’t have animal vectors represent local hazards. Pollution-sensitive asthma is endemic in many cities, for example.
Endemics are the overlooked risk
Most preppers focus on the risk of pandemic. I can see that. The risk is very real; in my opinion the highest probability TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) event out there. But pandemics aren’t where I spend most of my prepping.
I prep first and foremost for endemic diseases. In my area, that’s mostly vector-born disease. Mosquitoes here may carry West Nile or a related encephalitis. Ticks carry Heartland virus, among other nasties. Lung disease, COPD, is also endemic here; but I don’t worry about that one as I don’t spray chemicals. I know my risks.
On any given day working at The Place, I’m exposed to literally thousands of disease-causing vectors. Forgetting to permethrin my boots or do a tick check might, literally, ruin my health for life. That’s worth a lot more of my attention than Ebola. Missourians don’t generally share fruit with Ebola-infected bats after all.
What’s endemic where you are?
I encourage all preppers to look into what disease are endemic where they are. Don’t neglect the areas you plan to bug out through/to either. How do you do that? One easy way is to just search “*disease name* maps us”. That’ll give you a variety of data summaries to look at. For example, I did that for West Nile and got this:
Want to see if West Nile is endemic in your area? Here’s a map from the CDC.
You can also go to cdc.gov and search from there. I know, governments have agendas…but they Do get more comprehensive reporting than anyone else.
That prepper-fiction hero walking through a zombie-infested wasteland to reach his family never, ever falls to some stupid endemic tick virus. You may not be so lucky.