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Nov 15, 2021 · SARS-CoV-2 has officially claimed 5 million lives, but credible estimates place the pandemic’s true death toll closer to 17 million. Either count secures COVID-19’s position on our list of history’s deadliest plagues. A masquerade historical scene reconstruction. Plague doctor in medieval old town.
Western Hemisphere populations were ravaged mostly by smallpox, but also typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis. The lack of written records in many places and the destruction of many native societies by disease, war, and colonization make estimates uncertain.
EventYearsLocationDisease1350 BC plague of Megiddoc. 1350 BCMegiddo, land of CanaanAmarna letters EA 244, Biridiya, mayor of ...Hittite Plague /"Hand of Nergal"c. 1330 BCNear East, Hittite Empire, Alashiya, ...Unknown, possibly Tularemia. Mentioned in ...430–426 BCGreece, Libya, Egypt, EthiopiaUnknown, possibly typhus, typhoid fever ...412 BCGreece ( Northern Greece, Roman Republic ...Unknown, possibly influenza- Plague of Justinian—No One Left to Die
- Black Death—The Invention of Quarantine
- The Great Plague of London—Sealing Up The Sick
- Smallpox—A European Disease Ravages The New World
- Cholera—A Victory For Public Health Research
Three of the deadliest pandemics in recorded history were caused by a single bacterium, Yersinia pestis, a fatal infection otherwise known as the plague. The Plague of Justinian arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 541 CE. It was carried over the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, where plague-ridden fleas hitched a ride on...
The plague never really went away, and when it returned 800 years later, it killed with reckless abandon. The Black Death, which hit Europe in 1347, claimed an astonishing 25 million lives in just four years. Some historians estimate the disease led to even higher death tolls—up to 200 million. As for how to stop the disease, people still had no sc...
London never really caught a break after the Black Death. The plague resurfaced roughly every 10 years from 1348 to 1665—40 outbreaks in just over 300 years. And with each new plague epidemic, 20 percent of the men, women and children living in the British capital were killed. By the early 1500s, England imposed the first laws to separate and isola...
Smallpox was endemic to Europe, Asia and Arabia for centuries, a persistent menace that killed three out of ten people it infected and left the rest with pockmarked scars. But the death rate in the Old World paled in comparison to the devastation wrought on native populations in the New World when the smallpox virus arrived in the 15th century with...
In the early- to mid-19th century, choleratore through England, killing tens of thousands. The prevailing scientific theory of the day said that the disease was spread by foul air known as a “miasma.” But a British doctor named John Snow suspected that the mysterious disease, which killed its victims within days of the first symptoms, lurked in Lon...
- Dave Roos
- Prehistoric epidemic: Circa 3000 B.C. About 5,000 years ago, an epidemic wiped out a prehistoric village in China. The bodies of the dead were piled inside a house that was later burned down.
- Plague of Athens: 430 B.C. Around 430 B.C., not long after a war between Athens and Sparta began, an epidemic ravaged the people of Athens and lasted for five years.
- Antonine Plague: A.D. 165-180. When soldiers returned to the Roman Empire from campaigning, they brought back more than the spoils of victory. The Antonine Plague, which may have been smallpox, laid waste to the army and may have killed over 5 million people in the Roman empire, wrote April Pudsey, a senior lecturer in Roman History at Manchester Metropolitan University, in a paper published in the book "Disability in Antiquity," Routledge, 2017).
- Plague of Cyprian: A.D. 250-271. Named after St. Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage (a city in Tunisia) who described the epidemic as signaling the end of the world, the Plague of Cyprian is estimated to have killed 5,000 people a day in Rome alone.
- Antonine Plague. Deaths: 5 million • Cause: Measles and smallpox. In "The Plague in Rome," painted in 1869, artist Jules Elie Delaunay creates an allegorical representation of the scourge breaking down doors.
- Plague of Justinian. Deaths: 30-50 million • Source: Rats and fleas. Josse Lieferinxe's "Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken," ca. 1497, depicts Saint Sebastian kneeling to pray before God on behalf of people suffering from or killed by the plague.
- Black Death. Deaths: 75-200 million • Source: Rats and fleas. The plague in Tournai, then part of France, as depicted in "The Annales of Gilles de Muisit" from the mid-14th century.
- New World smallpox. Deaths: 25-55 million • Cause: Variola virus. Explorers arrived to the New World bearing more than just turnips and grapes. They also brought smallpox, measles and other viruses for which New World inhabitants had no immunity.
Jan 11, 2021 · Here’s how Covid-19 ranks among the worst plagues in history. One year ago, China announced the first Covid-19 death. Now, the disease is among the 10 deadliest pandemics in history.
Dec 7, 2023 · Time and again, people faced outbreaks of diseases – including influenza, cholera, bubonic plague, smallpox, and measles – that spread far and caused death and devastation. Our ancestors were largely powerless against these diseases and unable to evaluate their true toll on the population.
