With the crisis in West Africa killing more than 8,000 people and some cases being brought to the U.S., everyone is talking about Ebola – but should we refer to it as an outbreak or an epidemic? And what’s a pandemic for that matter?
There is a difference, and what it really comes down to is how many people are infected with a disease, if it has taken different forms or come from different sources and how spread out the infections have gone geographically.
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IFLScience broke down the definitions and examples:
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“An outbreak is the sudden occurrence of a disease in a community, which has never experienced the disease before or when cases of that disease occur in numbers greater than expected in a defined area.” So Ebola started in West Africa as an outbreak, but it has evolved into an epidemic now.
An epidemic is “an occurrence of a group of illnesses of similar nature and derived from a common source, in excess of what would be normally expected in a community or region.”
Another example of an epidemic is SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). “The epidemic killed about 774 people out of 8,098 that were infected,” IFLScience reported. “It started as an outbreak in Asia and then spread to two dozen countries and took the form of an epidemic.”
A pandemic is an epidemic that has spread worldwide. The H1N1 flu virus is a good example of that. It’s expected that it started in Mexico but then spread to different continents. This pandemic was so extreme it led the World Health Organization to announce the highest alert level (phase 6, pandemic) in 2009.
Then there’s the endemic, which is a disease that is habitually present within a given geographic area but doesn’t come from one common source. Dengue, which is spread by mosquitoes, is a good example of that because it is present in 100 countries but mosquitoes stay in a small region, so infection is not from one common source. That’s why it’s not a pandemic.
To put it simply, some diseases can follow order from outbreak to epidemic to pandemic depending on how wide it spreads. It’s not offensive to misuse these terms, but it’s good for us to be educated and to understand the scope of infections around the world, especially when medical professionals are informing the public using these terms.
