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Nov 15, 2021 · History’s Seven Deadliest Plagues. 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. 15 November 2021.
- 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
- The Plague at Athens (430-427 BC) The earliest recorded pandemic took place in the second year of the Peloponnesian War. Originating in sub-Saharan Africa, it erupted in Athens and would persist across Greece and the eastern Mediterranean.
- Antonine Plague (165-180) The Antonine Plague, sometimes referred to as the Plague of Galen, claimed almost 2,000 deaths per day in Rome. The total death toll was estimated to be around 5 million.
- Plague of Justinian (541-542) The Plague of Justinian affected the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire, especially its capital Constantinople as well as the Sasanian Empire and port cities around the Mediterranean Sea.
- Leprosy (11th century) Although it had existed for centuries, leprosy grew into a pandemic in Europe in the Middle Ages. Also known as Hansen’s disease, leprosy is due to a chronic infection of the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae.
- 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.
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 influenzaApr 7, 2020 · History’s deadliest pandemics, from ancient Rome to modern America. Centuries before coronavirus, plague, smallpox, yellow fever and other contagions killed hundreds of millions around the...
Apr 16, 2020 · The Black Death: A Timeline of the Gruesome Pandemic. One of the worst plagues in history arrived at Europe's shores in 1347. Five years later, some 25 to 50 million people were dead....