Living With Virus's

With a Covid-19 vaccine on the horizon, there is much talk of ending the pandemic which it certainly will but unfortunately it wont mean the end of Covid-19 as the sad fact is that most of the infections faced by our ancestors are still with us today, they are just controlled.
The first case of the Bubonic plague was recorded in 541 AD and had killed hundreds of millions of people over the past 1,500 years and last year 584 people died from the Plague but it can be treated with antibiotics.
The last major Cholera pandemic was 1817 and the bacteria responsible found in contaminated food or drinking water has been responsible for 40 million deaths overall and last year claimed 95,000 lives despite being treatable with a vaccine.
Influenza, or flu, is a seasonal threat but the largest pandemic was in 1918 and known as the Spanish flu,
killing between 50-100 million people although it faded away to become a more benign version that still circulates every year but the more benign version still accounts for 650,000 deaths annually.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV/Aids) transmitted through bodily fluids has claimed more than 32 million lives across the globe so far since it was first diagnosed in 1981 and last year the World Health Organisation said an estimated 690,000 people died from Aids and there is still no cure.
The current Coronavirius,which is a virus that has made the leap to humans from animals, is the third of it's type to hit humans, SARS in 2002 killed 800 and MERS in 2003 claimed 912 lives and although the virus is still active, no deaths were recorded last year and the World Health Organisation puts the risk as low.
More than a million have died with the Covid-19 virus so far although with the hunt for a vaccine seeming to be in the end stages, hopefully it wont be too long before a degree of normality returns but in all out history we have one once been able to definitively end a pandemic and wipe it out completely.
Smallpox was first recorded in 1520 and killed over 350 million people before a vaccine was developed in 1769 and the disease was completely erased although it took nearly two centuries to do so.