Teach Cough Hygiene Everywhere/Introduction

You are invited to help edit this Wikibook which is intended to "Train the Trainers" particularly professional and volunteer advocates working with the homeless/houseless, incarcerated persons, persons who are hospitalized or otherwise required to live in congregate circumstances where airborne infectious diseases may spread.

Cough hygiene is essential for prevention of the transmission of airborne infectious disease. The world has suffered greatly from various epidemics. The flu epidemic of 1918, coming at the end of WWI, actually killed more people than the war itself, according to NY Times science reporter Gina Kolata in her book on the topic.

Basic prevention information (General)

The World Health Organization publishes and distributes materials which will be useful to reference in the development of this book.

Historic pandemics

A pandemic (or global epidemic) is a disease that affects people over an extensive geographical area.

• Plague of Justinian, from 541 to 750, killed between 50% and 60% of Europe's population.
• The Black Death of 1347 to 1352 killed 25 million in Europe over 5 years (estimated to be between 25 and 50% of the populations of Europe, Asia, and Africa - the world population at the time was 500 million).
• The introduction of smallpox, measles, and typhus to the areas of Central and South America by European explorers during the 15th and 16th centuries caused pandemics among the native inhabitants. Between 1518 and 1568 disease pandemics are said to have caused the population of Mexico to fall from 20 million to 3 million.
• The first European influenza epidemic occurred between 1556 and 1560, with an estimated mortality rate of 20%.
• Smallpox killed an estimated 60 million Europeans during the 18th century (approximately 400,000 per year). Up to 30% of those infected, including 80% of the children under 5 years of age, died from the disease, and one-third of the survivors went blind.
• In the 19th century, tuberculosis killed an estimated one-quarter of the adult population of Europe; by 1918 one in six deaths in France were still caused by TB.
• The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 (or the Spanish Flu) killed 25-50 million people (about 2% of world population of 1.7 billion). Today Influenza kills about 250,000 to 500,000 worldwide each year.
• The COVID-19 pandemic, which was identified in December of 2019 and became a worldwide pandemic by early 2020, killing millions.