9 deadliest diseases that almost wiped the human race.
The recent out break of Corona virus COVID19 has me thinking about other possible incidents in the past that terrified the entire world.
I knew there has to be other viruses that has ones before put the world on a halt so I came up with this article.
There are couple of diseases that has ones threatened the existence of the human race. And these are only but a few.
1). Plague-The Black death-
This outbreak started in the mid 1300’s -this is one of the most destructive pandemic in history of the human race. The pandemic affected mostly Europe and Asia.
It is believed that the disease spread when people from the centre Asia travelled upon the silk road. It is believed that these traders carried with them rodents that has Yersinia pests bacteria that causes the disease.
But other theories points the cause towards human parasites like Fleas and body liace.
Science has proved that Ebola and the Black Death- may be similar in a way or two.
European countries didn’t quickly recover from the shock, there was mass infection and mass death. About 25 million people died in Europe because of this disease. About a third of Europe population was wiped out during this period, Reducing the world’s population at that time to 450
million.
It’s not fully understood what ended the pandemic but it did.
9). SARs infection
In 2003, there was an outbreak – Severe acute respiratory sickness that causes flu-like symptoms and muscle pain and often leads to pneumonia.
The respiratory disease took the life of 7,074 people in just 8,000 cases.These deaths were spread over 37 countries. It is believed that droplets from an infected person can infect a clean person in 3 ways.
This Corona virus started in Asia and went through Europe and North America in a short while.
The disease was thought to be originated by Chinese horseshoe bats.
8). The Third Cholera Pandemic
If left untreated the acute diarrhea can kill within hours.
Despite global efforts to stop it’s outbreak,Cholera still kills an estimate of 21,000 – 143,000 people a year.
But the deadliest form of Cholera outbreak came between 1853 and 1859.
Spreading from India,the pandemic made its way to Asia, Europe, Africa and North America.
Hundreds of thousands people lost their life in North America and about 5% reduction in Chicago’s population. Almost 200,000 people died in Tokyo alone within 1858 -1860 and an estimated 25,000 people died in Spain. But it was Russia that faced the biggest causality with over 1 million loses.
It was in 1864 that a physician John Snow traced the problem to the use of one water pump linking the disease to contaminated water.
7). Swine flu
In 2009 a 10 years old girl in California was diagnosed with a new strain of the influenza virus. It contains 4 strains of H1 N1 which are one of the causes of the Spanish flu in 1918.
It only took 2 months from the first case for the swine flu to be declared a Pandemic by the world health organization. By August 2010 the pandemic was over. But in this short time, the pandemic has infected over 61 million people in America alone.
6). Small pox
Small pox killed at least 30 percent of people who were infected with it. It’s a disease caused by the variola virus. It comes with a high fever and headache with small bumps filled with infectious fluids that appears all over the patient, and those are the pox.
when you survive,the eventually heal and turn to scars.
Humans infected each other through tiny droplets coughed or sneezed through the air. Another means on transmission to a new host can be through clothes or blankets used by a small pox patient.
Small Pox is said to cause death of up to 90% of the native American population at that time.
Some estimates think that George Washington lost more troops to the small pox Epidemic of 1775-1782 than in battle during the revolutionary war.
5). Syphilis
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted bacteria that made its way to Europe in colonies returning from America.it is caused by Treponema Pallidum bacteria and the initial symptoms are – rashes, sores,fever, headaches and muscle pain.
It is transmitted by direct contact with the sores or passed down from infected mother to her child. After a few weeks or months, rashes and sores disappear and the disease goes to a latent stage where it can be detected in a blood test but doesn’t cause symptoms. And in upto a third of the untreated cases,the disease comes back to cause Dementia dysfunction of multiple organs,lots of pain,and death.
The first outbreak of syphilis began in 1945 after a victory celebration by the French army with infected sex workers, and that was how it was called the French disease.
It’s hard to say for sure how many people Syphilis killed because there was no medical records that tracked cause of death. And sexually transmitted disease were considered shameful,so most people who were infected with this disease hide it.
This disease ravaged the world, until the first antibiotics ever created put an end to it.
4). Yellow Fever
This is a viral infection and most people infected with the Flavivirus experience symptoms like, fever chill, headaches and fatigue and vomiting.
An unlucky 15 percent of patients have it much worse, with bleeding,Jaundice and multi-organ failure which often leads to death.
Because people didn’t have a knowledge of how it’s caused or what causes it, so the couldn’t control it. More than 20,000 workers Died of either yellow fever or Malaria or both. It wasn’t until the 1900s that it was known that mosquitoes are the culprit of the yellow Fever.
The fight against mosquitoes began, the drained pools of water near towns and houses which is where mosquitoes lay their eggs. And pesticides were dropped everywhere else trying to kill all the mosquitoes they could find.
2)Ebola
The first known Ebola outbreaks in humans struck simultaneously in the Republic of the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976.
Ebola is spread through contact with blood or other body fluids, or tissue from infected people or animals.
It’s was recently spotted somehere in west Africa.
Symptoms includes
Pain areas in the abdomen, chest, joints, or muscles
Whole body: chills, dehydration, fatigue, fever, loss of appetite, sweating
Gastrointestinal: diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting, or vomiting blood
Also common: coughing up blood, eye redness, headaches.
1). Spanish flu
The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, it was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza -A virus that Lasted about 15 months from 1918 to 1919.
it infected over 500 million people – That is about a third of the world’s population at that time.
The death toll was over 40 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemic in human history.
The first observations of illness and mortality were documented in United States (in Fort Riley, Haskell county, Kansas as well as in New York ), France , Germany and the United Kingdom. To maintain morale, world war1 censors minimized these early reports.
Newspapers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain such as the grave illness of King Alonso the XIII and these stories created a false impression of Spain. And this gave it the name “Spanish” flu.
Historical and epidemiological data were unable to identify the pandemic’s origin, with different opinions to its location.
The influenza killed the very young and the very old, with a higher survival rate for those in between, but the Spanish flu killed more of the young adults.
Death caused by the spanish flu estimates to 17-50 million people and confirmed cases of 500 million people.