By Fabiha Faruque

Outbreaks of the current infectious disease, the Coronavirus, has instigated fear worldwide as people are concerned that the fast-spreading virus may inflict far too much harm before health officials can find not only a cure, but also a way to halt its expansion. The first case was detected in December 2019, and reports from specialists have shown that this virus, which has never been diagnosed in humans before, erupted in the capital of central China’s Hubei province: Wuhan.

Preceding over 2,000 mortalities, more than 70,000 people were reported to be infected with the Coronavirus in Mainland China, whereas all the other countries that were subjected to this contagious disease have been sporting less than 100 cases. The United States has only experienced a total of 15 cases with the outcome of zero deaths.

But as the global death tolls intensify, the recovery rates improve as well. Although no treatments have yet to be known, patients who are lucky enough to be diagnosed with the disease at an earlier stage are usually the individuals who develop a stable condition and recover with the help of drugs administered by hospitals, primarily in developed countries.

Following the growth of scientific knowledge, equipment, and medicine, comes the ability to create more testing kits, execute diagnoses, along with fighting diseases and infections. But regardless of how futuristic our societies have grown—be it through technological development, industrialization, and modernization—we are always one pandemic away from mass destruction.

Research from the World Health Organization has shown that infectious diseases are spreading faster than ever, with a new one emerging every year and progressively becoming more challenging to treat.

Most illnesses occur because of microbes such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. Since the 1950s, doctors have been prescribing drugs that contain antimicrobial agents; however, the use of such drugs have become so common that the microorganisms have quickly been to adapting to the antibiotics, stimulating drug resistance, and making it increasingly difficult to battle current diseases and disorders along with those that may emerge in the future.

Pandemics transmit from one person to another at an impressive rate, but once it finishes a cycle and shimmers down, people would generally expect the cause of panic to be gone for good. Nothing ever truly disappears as samples of every recorded disease are stored in labs all around the world for research purposes and insurance toward future outbreaks.

Samples of the smallpox disease are stored inside lab freezers positioned within laboratories at Russia, Atlanta, and Georgia, for example. Researchers then study those tiny microbe specimens and prepare for diseases, similar as such, that may surface.

However, scientists have been creating new and incurable diseases inside labs, and the U.S. government permits that very act since the lab conditions to perform such experiments meets suitability. Their goal is to create super-viruses and pathogenic bacteria that surpass a humans’ ability to fight off infection in order to initiate research on treatments that will combat drug resistant microbes.

The avian flu [H5N1], for instance, which was an influenza that killed about 400 people worldwide starting in 1977, was actively a test subject for pathogen-developing scientists and researchers. They have evolved H5N1 to jump between organisms using the animals that best represent humans: ferrets. Transmission was not a skill that the original H5N1 honed, yet it has become much more powerful with the deliberate help of man.

From growing anti-microbe resistance, to man-made super viruses, diseases are always growing and evolving, and humans are always creating new, combative antibodies to fight them. We are at a time when the word is preparing for the worst-case scenario given that the coronavirus has recently been codified as a global health emergency by the World Health Organization.

Earth’s natural cycle is cynical. Even if this current health crisis were to go about its normal sequence, another disease would eventually emerge and there is only so much that man-made technology can fend off. But the unsustainably short-term methods that we use to resist the damages only proves that the looming threat of Pandemics will never go away as we take steps closer to total demolition.