IN times past it was vital to have some urgent response to epidemics of disease, even though the agents causing these were unknown. Bubonic plague – bacillus anthracis/ the Black Plague stand out in horror in the UK epidemics of the 14th and 17th century.

Isolation by quarantine or by good fortune eg dwelling on an island, was the only way to stop the spreading. In that 17th century the rector of Eyam in Derbyshire, William Mompesson, quarantined the whole village to good effect but with over 200 souls dying for a greater good. And the reader will know that ships coming into our many ports from lands afar would anchor off with disease on board and fly the yellow flag.

The classic example of a logical response to an epidemic disease is joined to Dr Snow. Cholera, a disease causing life sapping ‘runs’, was rampant in London as people left the countryside and the population swelled with only open sewers for ‘waste’. ( video - https://youtu.be/su4Qm5pvagY43 minutes).

It was in 1854 that Dr Snow considered that contaminated drinking water was the cause and a particular well the source. He, with the agreement of the Board of Guardians, removed the pump handle to good effect. But already in 1848, the first Public Health Act was passed which gave every town the right to appoint a Medical Officer of Health. Bacteriology emerged later in the century, with the German Koch and French Pasteur leading. Koch was credited with identifying the TB bacillus and the cholera vibrio (motile - vibrio means to quiver I learn).

Ironically it was a remarkable Italian anatomist who first described the cholera ‘bug’ 30 years before Koch – in 1854 just as Dr Snow was putting theory into practice. He made other important findings but died pennyless – a common story.

So called Spanish ’flu scycthed many millions as the blood bath of WW1 was drawing to a close. I have just been given and read the book ‘Pandemic 1918’ by Catharine Arnold. It is a very detailed account across continents.

The very short incubation period fits with influenza but the description of many victims in their dying does not. It is not surprising that some doctors thought ‘pneumonic plague’ was the diagnosis – the same bacillus as above. Quarantine was practised in many places and ‘masking’ was common, but its virulence and rapid transmission won out.

As you know, ’flu epidemics happen here in the winter months. The ’flu vaccines that are offered are produced from the best guess strains isolated from the far east and Australasia. Sometimes the strain suffered is more vicious and the mortality rate greater – usually from the bronchopneumonia that follows.

But the point I made about the first strain of the corona virus which killed some elderly folk and those with chronic disease is important. (95 per cent of those dying with ‘covid’ had other significant disease eg airway disease)

When I visited nursing, care and residential homes, many of the folk were on the edge of life. Pale, chins on chest, sleeping and with the TV on in the lounge, they could be ‘knocked down with a feather’. I have shown a little of the history how organised humanity can help with thought and science to limit human suffering and death.

But note this. Tuberculosis is still rife in poor countries and was here in our islands before WW2. There were sanitoria all round Britain and the suffering from ‘consumption’ great.

Streptomycin, like penicillin derived from a mould, was a key drug for its control from about 1947. But it was not this that reduced TB to a trickle. It was improved housing and social conditions that were central. Crowding, poor nutrition and 'all work and no play’ were central factors in infection of the person, and transmission.

The pandemic of ‘covid’ was announced by the director-general of the UN World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus from Ethiopia when there had been only about a thousand fatal cases globally! Such a pandemic was forecast at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in October 2019.

The WHO receives substantial funding from the Gates Foundation and from pharmaceutical companies. Vaccination as a central policy grows larger whilst national autonomy in this is planned to be removed!

Uniquely in this very recent epidemic of an ‘engineered’ virus – corona virus , the healthy were isolated by ‘lock down’ (a term first used in US prison riots) though shopping for food was still allowed.

Any shedding was easily spread as an aerosol through the air conditioning/heating systems! I will in the next article show how parts of the £400 billion of your taxes (first as added national debt and three times OUR NHS annual budget) was spent without scientific or logic.

I end with an example of the evil in mankind, against the wholesome and the good – the 'love thy neighbour’. A cow died of anthrax in the ’30s. A professor bacteriologist in Oxford cultured it, and either preserved it frozen or kept it going in the right medium.

A sample was passed to the United States after WW2. Later during the terrible Iran/Iraq war, the US gave it to the Iraqi government which it was backing against the ‘ayatollahs’.

The Iranians had got rid of the Shah, put in position after the CIA and our MI6 had violently deposed Mossadegh the Prime Minister.

I see this lawyer served in the Iranian parliament from 1927. So our ally across the pond had aided another nation in the possible use of a most vile germ weapon – to cause pneumonic plague distributed from the air.