Perspective: The Plague The Real Reason to Panic About China’s Plague Outbreak

The Chinese government’s response to this month’s outbreak of plague has been marked by misguided emphasis on the wrong things. Laurie Garrett writes in Foreign Policy that rather than focusing on the germs and their spread, the Chinese government appeared to be more concerned with public relations and the management of public reaction to the disease.

As is often the case, the government’s efforts backfired, causing a public panic which is not justified by the facts.

Garrett writes:

Amid the growing panic about the plague, the irony is that it far outstrips the real risks. Despite its devastating impact on human history, Yersinia pestis need not inspire fear or death in 2019. That it still causes the latter in the age of antibiotics is proof of public health and political failures, not to the inherent virulence of the microbe. That it causes the former is mostly due to misunderstandings about the relevant history.

There have been three great plague pandemics in human history caused by the bacterium Y. pestis, spreading from Siberia and Mongolia, across Asia, and into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The first began in A.D. 541 within the Roman Empire, lasted two centuries, and was dubbed the Justinianic Plague. The second, the Black Death, spread from Asia into Italy in 1346 and persisted for 400 years, infecting most of the European population with such devastating outcome—50 million people died on a continent then inhabited by 80 million—that for centuries historians referred to it as the Great Mortality. The third pandemic began in the 1850s in China, spreading across Asia with such ferocity that India, alone, lost 20 million people.

The invention of antibiotics, Garrett notes, has dissipated the threat of a fourth pneumonic plague pandemic, even as the microbe continues to evoke profound public fear.From 2010 to 2015, there were 3,248 plague cases reported worldwide, with 584 deaths. Those numbers jumped with the Madagascar outbreaks in 2017 and 2018.

Lowering the risks of pandemics, Garrett says, requires transparency on the part of public health authorities. “But given the Chinese government’s public health history…. a fair amount of caution and skepticism is merited.”