Pandemic

Definitions: Pandemic

Pandemic

Adjective

1. Epidemic over a wide geographical area; "a pandemic outbreak of malaria".

2. Existing everywhere; "pandemic fear of nuclear war".

Noun

1. An epidemic that is geographically widespread; occurring throughout a region or even throughout the world.

Date "pandemic" was first used: 1666. (references)

Specialty Definitions: Pandemic

Domain	Definitions
Environment	A widespread epidemic throughout an area, nation or the world. (references)
Public Administration	Major international epidemic. Source: European Union. (references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Specialty Definition: Pandemic

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

A pandemic is a disease that affects people or animals over an extensive geographical area (from Greek pan all + demos people). Technically speaking it should cover the whole globe and affect everyone. Fortunately there has not been a pandemic in the true sense of the word.

Common killers and pandemics

Note that just because a disease kills a lot of people, this doesn't make it a pandemic. Many diseases, for example cancer, kill large numbers of people, but they are in fact a number of diseases lumped together for the sake of convenience.

Historical pandemics

There have been a number of significant pandemics in human history, all of them generally zoonoses that came about with domestication of animals - such as smallpox, diphtheria, influenza and tuberculosis. There have been a number of particularly significant epidemics that deserve mention above the 'mere' destruction of cities:

Peloponnesian War, 430 BCE. An unknown agent killed a quarter of the Athenian troops and a quarter of the population over four years. This fatally weakened the dominance of Athens, but the sheer virulence of the disease prevented its wider spread.
Antonine Plague, 165-180. Possibly smallpox brought back from the Near East; killed a quarter of those infected and up to five million in all. At the height of a second outbreak (251-266) 5,000 people a day were said to be dying in Rome.
Plague of Justinian, started 541. The first recorded outbreak of the bubonic plague. It started in Egypt and reached Constantinople the following spring, killing (according to the Byzantine chronicler Procopius) 10,000 a day at its height and perhaps 40 per cent of the city's inhabitants. It went on to destroy up to a quarter of the population of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Black Death, started 1300s. Eight hundred years after the last outbreak, the bubonic plague returned to Europe. Starting in Asia, the disease reached Mediterranean and western Europe in 1348 (possibly from Italian merchants fleeing fighting in the Crimea), and killed twenty million Europeans in six years, a quarter of the total population and up to a half in the worst-affected urban areas.
Cholera
- first pandemic 1816-1826. Previously restricted to the Indian subcontinent, the pandemic began in Bengal, then spread across India by 1820. It extended as far as China and the Caspian Sea before receding.
- The second pandemic (1829-1851) reached Europe, London in 1832, New York in the same year, and the Pacific coast of North America by 1834.
- The third pandemic (1852-1860) mainly affected Russia, with over a million deaths.
- The fourth pandemic (1863-1875) spread mostly in Europe and Africa.
- The sixth pandemic (1899-1923) had little effect in Europe because of advances in public health, but Russia was badly affected again.
- The seventh pandemic began in Indonesia in 1961, called El Tor after the strain, and reached Bangladesh in 1963, India in 1964, and the USSR in 1966.
The "Spanish Flu", 1918-1919. Began in August 1918 in three disparate locations: Brest, Boston and Freetown. An unusually severe and deadly strain of influenza spread worldwide. The disease spread across the world, killing 25 million in the course of six months; some estimates put the total of those killed worldwide at over twice that number. An estimated 17 million died in India, 500,000 in the USA and 200,000 in England. It vanished within 18 months, and the actual strain was never determined.

The epidemic disease of wartime was typhus, sometimes called "camp fever" because of its pattern of flaring up in times of strife. Emerging during the Crusades, it had its first impact in Europe in 1489 in Spain. During fighting between the Christian Spaniards and the Muslims in Granada, the Spanish lost 3,000 to war casualties and 20,000 to typhus. In 1528 the French lost 18,000 troops in Italy and lost supremacy in Italy to the Spanish. In 1542, 30,000 people died of typhus while fighting the Ottomans in the Balkans. The disease also played a major role in the destruction of Napoleon's grande armée in Russia in 1811.

Encounters between European explorers and populations in the rest of the world often introduced local epidemics of extraordinary virulence. Disease killed the entire native (Guanches) population of the Canary Islands in the 16th century. Half the native population of Hispaniola in 1518 was killed by smallpox. Smallpox also ravaged Mexico in the 1520s, killing 150,000 in Tenochtitlan alone, including the emperor, and Peru in the 1530s, aiding the European conquerors. Measles killed a further two million Mexican natives in the 1600s. As late as 1848-49, as many as 40,000 out of 150,000 Hawaiians are estimated to have died of measles, whooping cough and influenza.

There are also a number of unknown diseases that were extremely serious but have now vanished, so the etiology of these diseases cannot be established. Examples include the previously mentioned plague in 430 BCE Greece and the English Sweat in 16th-century England, which struck people down in an instant and was more greatly feared even than the bubonic plague.

Concern about possible future pandemics

Diseases that may possibly attain pandemic proportions include Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus and Bolivian haemorrhagic fever. As of 2002, however, the recent emergence of these diseases into the human population means their virulence is such that they tend to 'burn out' in geographically confined areas, or that their effect on humans is currently limited.

AIDS can be considered a global pandemic but it is currently most extensive in southern and eastern Africa. It is restricted to a small proportion of the population in other countries, and is only spreading slowly in those countries. If there was to be a true destruction-of-life pandemic it would be likely to be similar to AIDS, i.e. constantly evolving disease.

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs may also revive diseases previously regarded as 'conquered'.

In 2003, there were concerns that SARS, a new highly contagious form of pneumonia, might have become pandemic.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Pandemic."

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Synonyms within Context: Pandemic

Context	Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus).
Disease	Taint, pollution, infection, sepsis, septicity, infestation; epidemic, pandemic, endemic, epizootic; murrain, plague, pestilence, pox.
Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus.

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Crosswords: Pandemic

Non-English Usage: "Pandemic" is also a word in the following language with the English translation in parentheses.

Romanian (pandemic).

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Commercial Usage: Pandemic

Domain	Title
Books	A Select Body: The Gay Dance Subculture and the Hiv/AIDS Pandemic (reference) Aids, Philosophy and Beyond: Philosophical Dilemmas of a Modern Pandemic (Avebury Philosophy Series) (reference) Pandemic Influenza 1700-1900 (reference) The Dying of the Trees: The Pandemic in America's Forests (reference) The Gender Politics of Hiv/AIDS in Women: Perspectives on the Pandemic in the United States (reference) (more book examples)

Theater & Movies	Whether Lying in America is Pandemic (reference) (more DVD examples; more video examples)

Music	Pandemic Love (reference) (more classical music examples; more popular music examples)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Non-Fiction Usage: Pandemic

Subject	Topic	Quote
Health		A pandemic is a worldwide epidemic of a disease. (references)
		Ongoing global pandemic in Asia, Africa and Latin America for the last four decades. (references)
		The emergence of a new subtype of influenza A does not guarantee that a pandemic will occur. (references)
Economic History	Zambia	The HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to hamper development and depress productivity, as an estimated 19% of the working age population is infected. (references)
	South Africa	Imports are growing at a faster rate than the overall market (9.3 percent) and the prospects for further inroads is great, especially as the South African authorities, the private sector and international development bodies begin to coordinate their strategy to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic. (references)
	Kenya	Although the GOK allocated approximately $1.9 million towards combating the pandemic in the 2001/02 budget, much more is clearly needed to fight this scourge. (references)
Political Economy	South Africa	Representing the pre-1994 national liberation movement, the ANC is now overwhelmingly occupied with the critical need to provide adequate employment, education, health care (including addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic), and housing to the majority of South Africans whose standard of living was depressed under apartheid. (references)
Worker Rights	Kenya	However, deteriorating economic conditions and the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic have given rise to more child labor in the informal sector, which is difficult to monitor and control. (references)
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits.

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Usage Frequency: Pandemic

"Pandemic" is generally used as an adjective (general or positive) -- approximately 100.00% of the time. "Pandemic" is used about 17 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted)

Parts of Speech	Percent	Usage per 100 Million Words	Rank in English
Adjective (general or positive)	100%	17	85,106

Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.

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Expression: Pandemic

Expression using "pandemic": pandemic disease. Additional references.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Frequency of Internet Keywords: Pandemic

The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com.

Expression	Frequency per Day
pandemic	37
pandemic studio	13
influenza pandemic	9
the aids pandemic	6
aids facing pandemic	6
1918 influenza pandemic	4
1918 pandemic	3
hbo pandemic	2
game pandemic	2
africa aids in pandemic	2
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Modern Translations: Pandemic

Language		Translations for "pandemic"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses.
Albanian		pandemike, që prek gjithë popullatën. (various references)

Arabic		‏فاش للوباء, ‏شامل (catholic, comprehensible, comprehensive, extensive, full, full scale, general, generic, global, including, inclusive, overall, perfect, sweeping, thorough, total, universal). (various references)

Bulgarian		пандемичен, пандемия. (various references)

Czech		epidemický (epidemic, epidemical). (various references)

Dutch		pandemisch, pandemie (pandemia). (various references)

French		pandémie (pandemia). (various references)

German		pandemie (pandemic disease), seuche (contagion, epidemic, epidemic plague, epidemics, pandemic disease, pestilence, plague, scourge, transmissible disease). (various references)

Greek		πανδημία ιατρική. (various references)

Hungarian		országos járvány. (various references)

Italian		pandemico, pandemia. (various references)

Manx		er feie ny cruinney (worldwide). (various references)

Pig Latin		andemicpay.(various references)

Portuguese		pandemia, panda-rutilante. (various references)

Romanian		pandemie, pandemic. (various references)

Russian		пандемический, пандемия. (various references)

Serbo-Croatian		pandemična bolest, pandemičan, čulan (sensual). (various references)

Spanish		pandemia, pandémico (holo-endemic). (various references)

Swedish		pandemisk, pandemi, allmän (across the board, broad, common, general, generic, generical, omnibus, ordinary, overall, public, universal, usual). (various references)

Turkish		yaygın (broad, common, diffuse, diffusive, endemic, epidemic, epidemical, expansive, extensive, familiar, far flung, general, pervasive, prevailing, prevalent, regnant, rife, wide, widespread), birkaç ülkeye yayılan. (various references)

Ukranian		загальний (aggregate, all out, appellative, blanket, collective, common, general, generic, generical, global, net, nominal, overall, universal), пандемічний, пандемія, плотський (carnal, earthy, fleshly, libidinous, material, sensuous). (various references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references.

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Ancestral Language Translations: Pandemic

Language	Period	Translations
Greek	700 BCE-300 CE	pandemos. (various references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references.

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Derivations & Misspellings: Pandemic

Derivations
	Words beginning with "pandemic": pandemics. (additional references)
	Words ending with "pandemic": interpandemic. (additional references)
Misspellings
	"Pandemic" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: paandemic, pabdemic, paideia, Pandazis, Pandeli, pandemi, pandesic, Pandim, Pendefig, pendemic, Pendreich, Pendzenik. (additional references)
Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references).

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Rhyming with "Pandemic"

# of Phoneme Matches	Pronunciation	Word(s) rhyming with "pandemic" (pronounced pande"mik)
6	-n d e" m i k	endemic.
5	-d e" m i k	academic, epidemic, nonacademic.
4	-e" m i k	polemic, systemic.
3	-m i k	aerodynamic, anemic, atomic, autonomic, bulimic, cataclysmic, ceramic, comic, cosmic, cytoplasmic, diatomic, dynamic, economic, electrodynamic, endothermic, ergonomic, exothermic, formic, gastronomic, gimmick, gnomic, hemodynamic, hypodermic, hypoglycemic, hypothalamic, logarithmic, macroeconomic, microeconomic, mimic, monatomic, noneconomic, ophthalmic, organismic, panoramic, patronymic, photodynamic, psychodynamic, rhythmic, samek, seismic, socioeconomic, subatomic, tragicomic, uneconomic.
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits.

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Anagrams: Pandemic

Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams
	Words within the letters "a-c-d-e-i-m-n-p"
	-1 letter: pemican.
	-2 letters: aidmen, anemic, apneic, camped, cinema, daimen, dampen, decamp, encamp, iceman, impend, maiden, median, medina, minced, pained.
	-3 letters: acned, admen, aimed, amend, amice, amide, amine, amnic, anime, campi, caned, canid, caped, dance, denim, imped, maced, maned, manic, media, medic, menad, minae, mince, mined, named, nicad, paced, paned, panic, pecan, pined.
	-4 letters: aced, acid, acme, acne, aide, amen, amid, amie, amin, aped, cade, cadi, caid, cain, came, camp, cane, cape, cedi, cine, dace, dame, damn, damp, dean, deni, dice, dime, dine, emic, epic, iced, idea, idem, mace, made, maid, main, mane, mead, mean, mend, mica, mice, mien, mina, mind, mine, name, nape, neap, nema, nice, nide, nipa, pace, padi, paid, pain, pane, pean, pein, pend, pian, pica, pice, pied, pima, pina, pine.
	-5 letters: ace, aid, aim, ain, ami, amp, and, ane, ani, ape, cad, cam, can, cap, cep, dam, dap, den, die, dim, din, dip, end, ice, imp, mac, mad, mae, man, map, med, men, mid, nae, nam, nap, nim, nip, pac, pad, pam, pan, pea, pec, ped, pen, pia, pic, pie, pin.
	Words containing the letters "a-c-d-e-i-m-n-p"
	+1 letter: companied, compendia, decamping, impedance, pandemics.
	+2 letters: campaigned, championed, complained, impedances.
	+3 letters: accompanied, companioned, emancipated, endoplasmic, predicament.
	+4 letters: displacement, dopaminergic, miscaptioned, predicaments, predominance, predominancy.
	+5 letters: commandership, displacements, endolymphatic, intercompared, interpandemic, municipalized, predominances, unaccompanied, uncomplicated.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro.