THE RED-TOP newspapers were speculating last week whether bird flu, which has just reached a poultry farm in Turkey, could evolve into a human epidemic. Actually, they weren’t: they were warning of a pandemic, which sounds much more exciting — if not as exciting as it would have done a decade ago. Like the word “executive”, which used to mean a very important man in a Jaguar but is now applied to the “marketing executive” who sells classified ads, the word “pandemic” has suffered from a bit of inflation in recent years.

And it isn’t just the fault of the tabloids. My dog-eared 1993 edition of The Guinness Book of Records lists only one “pandemic”: the Black Death, or bubonic plague, of 1349, which killed 75 million people, including half the population of Europe. The influenza of 1918-19, by contrast, is merely listed as an “outbreak” of disease. Yet the Chief Medical Officer’s website now declares that the world is in the midst of “pandemics” of Aids and tuberculosis. Moreover, it invents a disease called “pandemic flu”, which struck the world not just in 1918-19, when it killed 20 million people, but also in 1957-58, when it killed one million, and in 1967, when another million died.

However miserable it was for the victims, a disease that kills one million people out of a global population — in 1967 — of 3.5 billion hardly deserves the same tag as one that kills half the human race and changes the course of history. In modern cant a pandemic is any infectious disease which pops up on two or more continents; an epidemic, by contrast, is limited to a small patch of a single continent. Given the prevalence of international travel, it is becoming virtually impossible for the world ever to suffer a mere epidemic ever again. But that doesn’t mean that your average “pandemic” is going to wipe out half the human race, or even more than a couple of jumbo jet-loads. The outbreak of Sars in 2003, which I have heard described as a “pandemic” on more than one occasion, on account of it afflicting Toronto as well as Hong Kong, killed just 774 people.

The first recorded use of pandemic in the English language was in 1666, the year after the Great Plague, when 100,000 Londoners received the call of the death cart. Presumably, contemporaries felt that “epidemic”, which had first appeared in 1603, was no longer strong enough and so came up with a word that means the same thing but sounds a bit stronger. If bird flu does end up killing a lot of people — its confirmed human death toll so far is fewer than 100 — presumably we in turn will have to come up with a stronger word still: maybe a “superdemic”. And the old word will become devalued to the point at which anyone who spends a couple of days in bed will be apt to say: “Don’t worry; it’s just a touch of pandemic flu.”

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