Horseshoe bats from a remote cave in China’s Yunnan province may have transmitted severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)....
1- B
Brain-swelling Encephalitis lethargica swept Massachusetts during the 1692 season of the notorious witchcraft trials. Girls from the village of Salem suffered from tremors and feverish hallucinations. Doctors blamed demonic possession.
2- C
Marco Polo’s Silk Road to China transported the bubonic plague via the fleas on humans and rodents. In 1346, reaching Venice, the plague spread through shipyards and trade routes. An estimated 100 million Europeans died.
3- D
Horseshoe bats from a remote cave in China’s Yunnan province may have transmitted severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Ebola’s patient zero may have been a bat-infected 18-month-year-old boy from Guinea. COVID-19 may have jumped from bats to humans in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
4- B
In 1906, after a deadly summer of typhoid, medical investigators traced the source of the epidemic to Mary Mallon of Oyster Bay, Long Island. Newspapers called her “Typhoid Mary.” Her story ever since has been used by biology teachers to explain how a seemingly healthy asymptomatic person can unknowingly transmit a disease.
5- B
In 1847 a measles outbreak ravaged Washington’s Walla Walla Valley, where Marcus and Narcissa Whitman had founded a mission school. The fever spared whites but decimated Indian children. Cayuse warriors took revenge in a raid that killed 14 people. Fifty others, mostly women and children, were held as hostages for nearly a month.
6- D
WWII’s insecticide “bug bombs” cleared paths for American soldiers. But in 1942, before the army had weaponized DDT, mosquitos forced General MacArthur’s retreat from the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula. Malaria in Sicily hospitalized more than 21,000 GIs.
7- C
Epidemiologists blame the bacterial pathogen Yersinia pestis. Hitting the Roman army in 541, cutting the supply line of wheat from the Nile Valley, the Plague of Justinian may have killed more than a fourth of the emperor’s kingdom. Death estimates range from 25 to 50 million people.
8- A
Tuberculosis was thought to be a disease of the elite and artistic. It seemed to make women frail and pale in ways that inspired operatic glorification. A friend once told Victor Hugo that his one great fault was that, being free from tuberculosis, the novelist could never suffer enough to truly achieve.
