The war on microbes — we are getting better at it
Despite the challenges posed by Covid-19, evidence shows humans are nowadays better equipped to deal with plagues than in the past
In 1918, SA Test cricketer Jacobus Petrus (JP) Duminy was a 21-year old student in mathematics at the newly inaugurated University of Cape Town when disaster struck.
In an interview with Howard Philips in 1978, he recalled: “My father was a veldkornet, an officer appointed by the government to do registrations of birth and deaths, among other things. And I could see people coming in, I could see through my window, coming in one after one, sometimes in klompies [clusters], groups of three, four, five, to come and register deaths. At one time there must have been a queue of 16, 17, 18 people outside his little office for the district [of] Tygerberg...
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