At the end of Fuzzy Mud, Tamaya is heralded as a hero for discovering the mutated mud substance and the rash it causes before it escalates into a pandemic—an infectious disease that spreads across an entire country or the world. The rash becomes an epidemic in Heath Cliff, Pennsylvania, but the Centers for Disease Control identifies it early enough that they are able to put the town under quarantine before the disease has a chance to spread.
From the Greek pandēmos, meaning "all" (pan) and "the people" (dēmos), pandemics are distinguished from epidemic diseases in that epidemics affect many people within a limited area or community. A disease is classified as endemic when it is a constant presence in a region, such as malaria in Africa. Endemic diseases differ from pandemics and epidemics in that their case numbers stay relatively stable, infecting a predictable—and therefore more manageable—percentage of the population than a disease undergoing an "outbreak" does.
Among the most famous historical examples of pandemics are the 1918 influenza pandemic (commonly known as the Spanish flu), smallpox, and the Black Death (or The Plague). In the fourteenth century, the Black Death's bubonic plague pandemic wiped out between 75 and 200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa, making it the most fatal pandemic in human history. With an estimated reduction in the European population by 30 to 60 percent, the Black Death had a profound impact on European history.
More recent examples of pandemics include tuberculosis, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and Covid-19, the latter two of which are considered current pandemics. The main strategies to control outbreaks are containment and mitigation so healthcare providers are not overburdened by new cases outpacing their ability to treat patients. In 2020, governments around the world mandated that people stay at home in order to limit the spread of the Covid-19, a respiratory disease that has since killed over six million people.
