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Recent Cholera outbreaks in Haiti is a grave reminder that we are all responsible players in proliferous pandemics.
In 1832 and 1866 Cholera laid waste to NY city and in both cases blame was laid on Montreal and unquarantined Irish settlers respectively. The first recorded Cholera pandemic was in 1816.
Scapegoating has a long and ignoble tradition in the historic recounting of pandemics such as the alleged contraction of Syphillis by Columbus' sailors from the Indians of Hispaniola in 1492.
Some of those sailors fought in the 1494 seige of Naples and a mysterious, destructive disease emerged among brothel visitors, first called the Neopolitan Curse. In "The Prostitute's Pupil" a popular history of syphillis, the Italians called it French Pox, the French called it the Italian Pox, the Spanish called it the Dutch Itch, Russians called it the Polish Disease and the Turks called it the Christian Disease. In the end it was given the Latin moniker, Morbus gallicus, reminiscent of Gaul, the French ultimately blamed by way of linguistic certitude. Later science traced it as a New World disease - the silent revenge of Aboriginal Americans for the Measles, Small Pox, Tuberculosis, Chicken Pox and Plague that Columbus, Pizzaro and Cortez would visit upon them with devastating effect.
It would serve us well, as always, to learn from history - we are all responsible individually for our actions and exposure and sickening panic born of blame.
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