It should not be that hot that far north.

Buildings and traffic lights are melting, I can only imagine what the power grids must look like in some cities considering the hoards of people hooking up AC units to their home, and most importantly, people are dying.

I'm from the uk. Our buildings are built to keep heat in. As in, there are government regulations about the minimum amount insulation new homes have to have. As in, you can get a grant to buy a heat pump so you spend less money on heating over the winter. As in, most buildings do not have a/c because the idea of wanting your home or office to be colder was laughable not even ten years ago. We used to hit 20°C in summer. 25°C in August, if we were lucky. This year we had temperatures 30°C+ in May. Schools got closed because it was too hot. We've never had that before.

When I was a kid, and I was born in the early 2000s, we averaged out at about a week's worth of snow days per winter. If you live in a country without those, it means the snow was so bad the schools had to shut because that many people couldn't get in. I had several classmates who missed school because, even though it wasn't a snow day, they were still stuck at home because of the snow. I remember bitching about my primary school headteacher having the rule of "if I can get in, you can get in" when he lived five minutes walk from the school and some of us were up on the hills and we literally couldn't open our front doors because the snow was that deep. I have a core memory of standing in the snow outside the school gates, my younger sibling holding my hand so tightly I thought my fingers were gonna fall off as I called our dad repeatedly until he picked up because the school was closed and we'd only found that out once we got there. I can remember wading through snow as a child to get off the hills and down to the main road bc we needed to go to the shops but the car was literally buried in snow. I can remember a white easter where my mother just tossed tiny chocolate eggs out in the snow (which was still falling) for us to find rather than properly hiding them. When the snow finally melted a week later, we were still finding eggs.

Last winter, it barely snowed at all.

We hit 14°C is January. And maybe that's normal where you are, but it's not normal here. Our January's should be 5°C at the highest.

Point and laugh all you want, but we've have over two hundred people die from "heat related deaths" so far this year and it's only going to get hotter.

XKCD: Degree Off

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

Multi-Generational

Game Of Telephone.