Keep calm and address Ebola: a brief history of pandemics at The Spectator

Ebola clinics in many parts of West Africa are full, so more and more people are being told to stay at home and take Paracetamol and fluids if they become infected. It means if someone in your family gets Ebola, you all have to stay in the house, which is effectively a death sentence.

At the moment, the disease is killing 70 per cent of the people it infects, but that’s likely to go up. People who need other medical treatment can’t get it, and in Sierra Leone 40 per cent of farmland has been abandoned. Western governments are building secure military encampments for health workers, fearing civil unrest and angry mobs.

In 1898, there were plague riots in India after authorities brought in sanitary measures, including quarantine camps. The Spectator at the time reported:

A crowd composed of both Hindoos and Mussulmans endeavoured to rescue some prisoners sentenced at Seringapatam for breaking the rules, and, being defeated, called in ten thousand men from the surrounding villages, and made a desperate attack upon the fort… Many even swam the river, and the police and a small body of cavalry were compelled to fire, killing many, though the number is not stated… The people of Mysore think the precautions ordered by science far more dreadful than the Plague.