Question

SAQ help please

passage: "The Spanish flu was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history—a potent reminder of the threat posed by disease.

Humanity seems to need such reminders often. In 1948, shortly after the first flu vaccine was created and penicillin became the first mass-produced antibiotic, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall reportedly claimed that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent. In 1962, after the second polio vaccine was formulated, the Nobel Prize–winning virologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet asserted, ‘To write about infectious diseases is almost to write of something that has passed into history.’

Hindsight has not been kind to these proclamations. Despite advances in antibiotics and vaccines, and the successful eradication of smallpox, Homo-sapiens is still locked in the same epic battle with viruses and other pathogens that we’ve been fighting since the beginning of our history. When cities first arose, diseases laid them low, a process repeated over and over for millennia. When Europeans colonized the Americas, smallpox followed. When soldiers fought in the first global war, influenza hitched a ride, and found new opportunities in the unprecedented scale of the conflict.”

"The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?” by Ed Yong, the Atlantic, 2019


a) Identify ONE environmental factor, alluded to by the author, that is typically present and required for the spread of infectious disease on an epidemic or pandemic scale.

b) Identify ONE specific example of a 20th-century health epidemic that encouraged technological advancement and that is NOT explicitly referenced by the author.

c) Explain ONE specific example of why the optimism of Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet and George Marshall may have been misplaced.

Answer 1

I got a 95% on this

A) One environmental factor that is typically present and required for the spread of infectious disease on an epidemic or pandemic scale is human migration, as it helps spread diseases that may have been isolated in a particular area to many other areas. The author mentions this in the last paragraph, “When Europeans colonized the Americas, smallpox followed. When soldiers fought in the first global war, influenza hitched a ride, and found new opportunities in the unprecedented scale of the conflict.” This shows that when people moved from place to place, diseases were more easily spread. When you look at previous epidemics and pandemics, and even the pandemic currently going on, one thing is always present: the disease was originally isolated in a single area, and then was later spread through migration.

B) One specific example of a 20th-century health epidemic that encouraged technological advancement was the cholera outbreak in the Romanian Army in 1913. This encouraged technological advancement, as it was within the army during the Second Balkan War, and having an outbreak in the middle of that was very dangerous. As a result, vaccines were quickly produced, systems were put in place that would prevent the spread, the infected were isolated, as well as several other procedures. That is just one of many examples of technological advancements made to stop epidemics.

C) One specific example of why the optimism of Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet and George Marshall may have been misplaced is because in the end, vaccines only HELP manage the danger to a person, but there’s not a 100% chance of it eradicating it. Also, vaccines can evolve into new strains, ones that vaccines and the human immune system are not prepared for, so simply saying that infectious diseases are something of the past is ignoring that fact. Infectious diseases can come out of seemingly nowhere, so just because the current pandemic is taken care of, that does not mean that it is gone for good.