Viruses, Factors Affecting Viral Pandemics and Its Results

Viruses are submicroscopic infectious agents that replicate in living cells and can infect any organism, including animals, plants, bacteria, and archaea. Because they do not have a cell structure, they are called biological agents. Viruses are defined as DNA virus or RNA virus according to the genome they have.

Viruses cause many serious diseases in humans such as colds, flu, chickenpox, herpes, rabies, Ebola, AIDS (HIV), avian influenza and SARS. There are 219 viruses that are known to infect humans. Over the past 100 years, viral pathogens have been shown to be caused by a large number of pandemics (such as Spanish flu, Yellow fever, AIDS, COVID-19). It is known that most of the new viral pandemic pathogens are transmitted from animals to humans. Especially increasing global travel and integration, urbanization, changes in land use and more use of natural environments increase the risk of pandemics. Pandemics are large-scale outbreaks that can cause significant economic, social and political distortion in a wide geographic area. As in the 2019 Covid19 pandemic, countries often close their jobs, interrupt transportation, and motivate some governments to close land borders and restrict the entry of citizens from affected countries during pandemics. It cancels the planned commercial flights and reduces transportation, motivating trade and travel, and may cause cargo services to stop. During a severe pandemic, all sectors of the economy (agri-culture, manufacturing, services) can potentially lead to shortages, rapid price increases for basic products, and economic stresses for households, private companies and governments. Scientific data show that pandemic diseases can have important social and political consequences, cause conflicts between states and citizens, weakening of state capacity, displacement of the population, triggering social tension and discrimination. Infectious diseases have a wide range of social effects. Fear and panic caused by such outbreaks can sometimes cause sudden population movements. Immigrants in this situation may face health risks arising from health problems, malnutrition and other stress factors. More importantly, immigration carries the risk of spreading the epidemic to other regions. In addition, infectious disease outbreaks can cause vulnerable social groups, such as ethnic minorities, to be stigmatized and blamed for their illness and consequences.