The social history of viruses describes the influence of viruses and viral infections on human history. Epidemics caused by viruses began when human behaviour changed during the Neolithic period, around 12,000 years ago. Viruses of plants and livestock also increased, and as humans became dependent on agriculture and farming, diseases such as potyviruses of potatoes and rinderpest of cattle had devastating consequences.
About Social history of viruses in brief
The social history of viruses describes the influence of viruses and viral infections on human history. Epidemics caused by viruses began when human behaviour changed during the Neolithic period, around 12,000 years ago. Viruses of plants and livestock also increased, and as humans became dependent on agriculture and farming, diseases such as potyviruses of potatoes and rinderpest of cattle had devastating consequences. Smallpox and measles viruses are among the oldest that infect humans. HIV is one of the most pathogenic new viruses to have emerged in centuries. Most viruses are beneficial. They drive evolution by transferring genes across species, play important roles in ecosystems and are essential to life. The transmission of viruses from animals to humans can occur, but such zoonotic infections are rarer, although there are notable exceptions such as influenza. Humans have developed a tolerance to viruses, and most infected with one species of virus are milder than others. Records of these milder viruses are rare, but it is likely that early virus infections are at least 80 million years old. Other viruses, more ancient, viruses have been less of a threat to humans and the human populations were too small to maintain the infection chains of infection. Herpes viruses were the first modern humans infected with the virus, but they were not fully adapted to humans until at least one million years ago and are still a rarer threat to modern humans. The pandemic of 1918–19, in which 40–50 million died in less than a year, was one of most devastating in history.
Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner were first to develop vaccines to protect against viral infections. The nature of viruses remained unknown until the invention of the electron microscope in the 1930s, when the science of virology gained momentum. Earlier, humans lived in small, isolated communities and most epidemic diseases did not exist. As modern humans increased in numbers and dispersed throughout the world, new infectious diseases emerged, including those caused by virus. The spread of the poty viruses of potato, and other fruits and vegetables, began about 6,600 years ago, and the spread of sobemoviruses – southern bean mosaic virus – date from this time. In about 9000 BC, when many people began to settle on the fertile flood plains of the River Nile, the population became dense enough for the virus to maintain a constant presence because of the high concentration of susceptible people. Other epidemics of viral diseases that depend on large concentrations of people, such as mumps, rubella and polio, also first occurred. The Neolithic age, which began in the Middle East in about 9500BC, was a time when humans became farmers. This agricultural revolution embraced the development of monoculture and presented an opportunity for the rapid spread of several species of plant viruses. Humans probably came into contact with these rodents, and some people became infected by the viruses they carried. When viruses cross this so-called ‘species barrier’ their effects can be severe, and humans may have had little natural resistance.
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This page is based on the article Social history of viruses published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
