Pandemic

:For other uses, see the disambiguation section

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A pandemic, or global epidemic, is an outbreak of an infectious disease that affects people or animals over an extensive geographical area (from Greek pan all + demos people).

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A disease or condition is not pandemic specifically because it kills a lot of people. For example, the class of diseases known as cancer is responsible for a large number of deaths. But the deaths and disabilities due to cancer are not considered a pandemic because the condition is not infectious (although certain infectious agents are known to increase cancer risk).

Epidemic: An epidemic is a disease that appears as new cases in the population in a period of time at a rate (the number of new cases in the population during a specified period of time is called the incidence rate) that substantially exceeds what is "expected," based on recent experience. It is therefore a s...

Infectious disease: In medicine, infectious disease or communicable disease is disease caused by a biological agent (e.g. virus, bacterium or parasite), as opposed to physical (e.g. burns) or chemical (e.g. intoxication) causes....

Greek: The noun Greek refers to:...