Firstly, are we talking of epidemics, mainly of endemic diseases, or pandemics?
Epidemics have likely always been quite common, historically. These include the so-called "plagues" the ancient Hebrews and others of their rime, recorded.
Pandemics, no. Those did not really start to appear until the waves of the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) across Europe from Mediaeval time on.
Endemic diseases have always been around, including Leprosy that was common in Europe as well as the tropical countries until only a few hundred years ago. Some of these might have flared and faded as epidemics.
Why?
Simply the huge growth of international travel within the last two or three hundred years. Prior to the European colonisers few people left their home countries; or even their home towns. There were traders and they would have brought infections with them, but they were relatively few in number. This growth has accelerated even more within the last fifty years thanks to air-travel now taken so much for granted.
Also of course...
- Populations were far smaller than today, although towns tended to be crowded and very insanitary places, even for the supposedly very sophisticated Romans.
- Most people did not live for very long, compared to today, anyway; dying from all sorts of diseases we now know are curable, and many avoidable; and injuries.
......
Regarding the "Spanish Flu", there was no such thing.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic was of a strain spread by the very large numbers of troops and refugees moving around at the close of World War One.
Its origin has not been identified as most likely a particular, remote poultry farm with very unhealthy living conditions within America, not China, nor any other Asian country. The carriers were family members joining the Army, hence the fighting.
Another theory also discounted was it originated among British troops in the Western Front, but this seems a co-incidence with another, similar disease.
See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC340389/
Why did it become wrongly-named the "Spanish 'Flu"? Censorship! The Press in the fighting countries was rigidly controlled during the War, and gave little or no publicity to the disease. Spain was neutral and its Press fully reported the outbreaks within Spain and elsewhere.
So that part of the heading diagram is incorrect on two counts, and by the same journal! I wonder how the the Antonine Plague could be blamed on China? I don't know how an epidemic or pandemic thousands of years ago can be traced accurately anyway but that one seems odd. There was some small-scale trading overland between Orient and Occident, thousands of miles apart, but no large-scale contact. Certainly no way to know if someone fell with an unfamiliar illness, it may have come from an infected traveller from far away.
Poor China does seem blamed for many, but always rightly? As nations become more and more connected I wonder if it becomes harder to establish any disease's source, though when politics starts to get in the way it becomes harder still. It's almost as if, "We don't know - so it must have been from Chinese pigs".
I do not place any weight on Biblical "prophecies" about plagues. They are only stating the obvious.
Its authors wrote of their Mediterranean-coastal cultures a few thousand years ago. Athough epidemics and assorted other natural disasters were, and are, rare in an individual's life, overall they were common enough regionally to be a serious fact of life. So of course such events will happen again and might lead to large-scale migrations. We know that now, and the Bible only shows some people realised it then, by their own societies' experiences.
The ancient seers were unable to understand the diseases and origins, and to forecast the next one; but had the sense not to try to predict when. A shame that sense is absent in those in our time who will not understand statistical comments like "hundred-year events", when one happens twice in twenty.
Unlike Daniel and his ilk, we can understand the diseases and possible origins.
Like them, we still cannot really predict what will be the next and when - only that one will happen of some sort at some time.
[The same with volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and major floods. Had the Holy Land been around the Gulf of Mexico its prophets would have listed great tempests (hurricanes and cyclones), instead.]
