At the 69th World Health Assembly, Margaret Chan gave a speech about how the current world is unprepared to deal with pandemics. Though medicine has greatly improved over the last century, so has the ease with which people can travel, which allows more diseases to spread.
As the world becomes more global, so do diseases. This is similar to the spread of disease caused by the Colombian Exchange, in the 1600 and 1700 hundreds. Because parts of the world that hadn't previously interacted where able to, they were also able to share diseases, which led to many deaths of Native Americans.
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/05/23/479199256/whos-stern-warning-the-world-is-not-prepared-to-cope-with-pandemics
I just read a book for AP lit called station 11 and it was about a pandemic that wiped out like 98% of the population and it was really terrifying, and the primary means of it spreading was through airplanes and international travel
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