ABSTRACT
The word “epidemic” is often employed metaphorically, but it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a literal or a metaphorical meaning is intended, in such phrases as “an epidemic of sports injuries” and “an epidemic of smoking-related deaths.” Epidemics, as we shall use the word, are diseases that suddenly strike a community and in time either entirely abate, or nearly so, or else become endemic (long-term but not especially alarming) features of a society’s pathological environment, once their virulence has significantly diminished. Such terms as “plague” and “pestilence” are typically used as conceptually imprecise synonyms of the word “epidemic.”
