ABSTRACT
This chapter describes characteristics of pandemics of infectious and chronic diseases that will be applied to the coronary heart disease pandemic of the twentieth century. Pandemics and epidemics include both infectious and chronic diseases. Most pandemics have causal factors that differ from the causes of the disease in normal times. The great influenza pandemic of 1917-1920 clearly met the criteria for a major pandemic in terms of the rapid increase in mortality rates at the onset of the pandemic. The lung cancer pandemic that began in the mid-twentieth century is an example of a pandemic of a noninfectious disease. The tuberculosis pandemic in advanced countries was not caused by broad long-term social changes, even though they are usually used to explain it. Tuberculosis mortality rates varied considerably among geographic regions, another basic characteristic of pandemics. The history of the tuberculosis pandemic reveals much about the complexity and diversity of pandemics.
