At the beginning of the 20th century, in 1918, the influenza epidemic killed more than 20 million human beings. In recent years, between 2009 and 2010, the Mexican influenza pandemic alarmed the world, fearing that the history of deaths would repeat itself again, but thanks to the actions of the health authorities and the army, as well as the unusual discipline of the population, the cases only reached thousands and mortality barely exceeded 1000 people.
However, as we all know, in March 2020, a pandemic was declared due to a type of coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 and, until now, continues to cause infections and deaths throughout the world.
During the history of the humanity, there have been terrible diseases whose cures were totally unknown until scientists of the stature of Leewenhoek, Pasteur, Koch, Roux, Behring and Finlay, among many others, constructed the way for the understanding of microbes and the search for vaccines to combat the diseases caused by them.
It was Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch merchant, who, at the end of the 18th century, built the first lenses with which he discovered the existence of tiny beings known today as microbes. With the works of the Italian father Spallanzani, the French scientist Luis Pasteur and the German doctor Roberto Koch, it was discovered that many of these beings were the cause of various epidemic diseases. The number of scientists to whom today we owe the cure and in some cases, the eradication of the diseases as horrible as black pox that hit Europe during the Middle Ages is enormous.
Let us see something about smallpox and cholera, their cures and to whom we owe this great benefits.
