Even if there is no official definition, it is accepted that the pandemic is a “globalized” version of the epidemic.
When it entered the French dictionary in 1752, the word pandemic was considered a synonym forepidemic. Today, the two terms are used to describe separate phenomena. According to Larousse, an epidemic is " the development and rapid spread of a contagious illness, most often of infectious origin, in a population " As for the pandemic, it is "an epidemic extended to the entire population of a continent, even to the whole world". Everything is therefore a question of scale.
Pandemic: a global epidemic
It is most often at the World Health Organization (WHO) that comes the transition from one to the other. The virus Ebola, which struck West Africa between 2014 and 2016, was mainly confined to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Some sporadic cases have been recorded in other countries, but without diffusion massive on all continents.
Conversely, the Covid-19, which started in China, has gone from epidemic to pandemic status the 12 March 2023, after the milestone of 110,000 people has been passed, including 20,000 cases in the European region. " Covid-19 can be called a pandemic due to the rapid increase in the number of cases outside of China in the past 2 weeks, and the increasing number of affected countries ", Said WHO in its press release.
Today we are talking about a pandemic, including for chronic conditions, such asobesity, the diabetes, smoking, Cancer, or the resistance to the antibiotics.
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