The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is literally the worst outbreak of the virus in history, and according to the CDC’s best case scenario, it will continue until late October. To date, more than 800 people have died from Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria, which reported its first death in July.

No outbreak since the virus was first discovered in 1976 has killed as many people as this one or spanned more than one country or continent. This outbreak is in four,, so it’s unprecedented and bad. Like, really bad. Various global health organizations are scrambling to send in back-up, but containing the virus has become more about education than anything else.

Ebola’s symptoms are like something out of a science-fiction horror story and involve blood coming out of every orifice in an infected individual's body. One bleeds out because the virus has ruined their white blood cells ability to clot blood. It’s scary to watch, and there is no cure or vaccine.

Treatment is purely about hydration and reducing the high Ebola fever while in quarantine, which is required as the virus is highly contagious and spreads through bodily fluids like semen, saliva, and sweat, including fingerprints on cellphones.
One man in 2012 got Ebola after stealing another man’s phone, for example.

This particular strain of the Ebola virus (there are five) is known as the Zaire ebolavirus and usually kills about 79 percent of the people it infects, though this time around is only killing 60 percent (for reference, the plague, aka the Black Death, kills about 11 percent).

History suggests epidemics of significant proportions began similarly, hence the need to quickly bring the virus under control.

THE BLACK DEATH

The Black Death (also known as The Black Plague or Bubonic Plague), was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, widely thought to have been caused by a bacterium named Yersinia pestis (Plague), but recently attributed by some to other diseases.

The origins of the plague are disputed among scholars. Some historians believe the pandemic began in China or Central Asia in the late 1320s or 1330s, and during the next years merchants and soldiers carried it over the caravan routes until in 1346 it reached the Crimea in southern Russia. Other scholars believe the plague was endemic in southern Russia.

In either case, from Crimea the plague spread to Western Europe and North Africa during the 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide is estimated at 75 million people, approximately 25–50 million of which occurred in Europe.

The plague is thought to have returned every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 1700s. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe.

THE THIRD PANDEMIC

“Third Pandemic” is the name given to a major plague pandemic that began in the Yunnan province (pictured above) in China in 1855. This episode of bubonic plague spread to all inhabited continents, and ultimately killed more than 12 million people in India and China alone.

According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic was considered active until 1959, when worldwide casualties dropped to 200 per year.

The bubonic plague was endemic in populations of infected ground rodents in central Asia, and was a known cause of death among migrant and established human populations in that region for centuries; however, an influx of new people due to political conflicts and global trade led to the distribution of this disease throughout the world.

New research suggests Black Death is lying dormant.

FIRST CHOLERA EPIDEMIC

Cholera has been around for centuries — the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates seems to allude to it in his work — but for a long time it was restricted to the delta region of India's Ganges River. It wasn't until 1817 when, carried by travelers along trade routes, the disease spread throughout the rest of India and into what is now modern-day Burma and Sri Lanka.


Referred to as "Asiatic cholera" by Britain and the U.S. (which would not be hit by the disease until the 1830s), it eventually reached the Philippines and even Iraq, where 18,000 people died during one three-week period in 1821.

This was the first of seven cholera pandemics that have spread throughout the globe.

Scattered outbreaks of cholera is seen common in many parts of Africa

THE MEMPHIS YELLOW FEVER

In 1878, thousands of refugees fled Cuba during the tail end of the Ten Years' War for independence from Spain — and with them they carried yellow fever. Despite government efforts, including the Quarantine Act, which gave the Marine Hospital Service authority to quarantine infected ships, New Orleans quickly fell victim to a yellow-fever epidemic.

Several hundred miles north along the Mississippi River, Memphis braced for the disease. City officials blocked all cargo from New Orleans, but the business community pressured them into relenting.

Not a good decision: by the end of the year, 5,000 people had died in Memphis alone.

In total, the Mississippi Valley counted 20,000 deaths.

THE 1916 POLIO EPIDEMIC

Five years before 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio, the paralyzing disease struck thousands in the U.S., killing some 6,000.

During the 1916 epidemic, 9,000 cases occurred in New York City, which called for quarantines. Polio would haunt the country for decades, afflicting thousands each year; TIME wrote in 1946that "for many a parent who had lived through the nightmare fear of polio, there was some statistical encouragement: in 1916, 25% of polio's victims died. This year, thanks to early recognition of the disease and improved treatment (iron lungs, physical therapy, etc.) the death rate is down to 5%."

It was only in the 1950s that Dr. Jonas Salk finally developed a vaccine. With the aid of this vaccine, polio is almost extinct globally, with our own Nigeria aboout the only country still habouring the disease.

The JUSTINIAN PLAGUE

The dynamic and powerful Byzantine Emperor Justinian is remembered for having tried to restore the fallen glory of ancient Rome by waging a series of military campaigns to retake lands that had been overrun by barbarian tribes.

But, while Justinian's armies were fleetingly successful, another scourge bearing his name was far deadlier. Around A.D. 540, a disease borne by rats in Egypt — long the breadbasket of the Mediterranean world — spread to the Byzantine capital at Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) where, by some accounts, it claimed 5,000 lives a day and killed nearly half the ancient metropolis' population. From there, the plague moved east and west, becoming antiquity's most lethal known pandemic.

Half a century after it began, between 25 million and 100 million in Europe and Asia had died. Some historians say the damage was so great to the Persian and Byzantine empires that it made them vulnerable to the Muslim conquests of the next century.

The devastation the plague wrought may have also ushered in the period now known as the Dark Ages in Europe.

THE 2003 SARS EPIDEMIC

First reported in Asia in 2003, it was the illness that popularized the surgical-mask as street wear. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which is caused by a virus, spread to more than two dozen countries in North America, South America, Europe and Asia before being contained.

More than 8,000 people were sickened and 774 died after contracting the disease from droplets released through coughing and sneezing.

Symptoms included high fever, headache and body aches, and after about a week many would develop a dry cough and eventually pneumonia — hence the face masks.

Because there is no cure for SARS, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health organizations focused on educating people about prevention.

After nearly six months of panic, the SARS outbreak was contained in July 2003.

THE SMALL POX PANDEMIC

Though it had long been eradicated in other parts of the world, the infectious disease smallpox raged through mid-1970s India, with more than 100,000 reported cases and at least 20,000 deaths.

The illness, which is unique to humans, is caused by one of two viruses, variola minor and variola major. The disease results in a skin rash that eventually forms raised, fluid-filled blisters all over the body.

The malignant and hemorrhagic forms of these lesions most often prove to be fatal. Following a period of intense eradication and monitoring by an international commission, India was declared smallpox-free in May 1975.

The small pox is now an eradicated disease, but some high profile research labs may still have the virus.

THE PLAGUE OF ATHENS

"A plague so great as this, and so dreadful a calamity, in human memory could not be paralleled." This passage comes courtesy of the Greek historian Thucydides in one of the well-known passages from hisHistory of the Peloponnesian War.

Granted, this was around 430 B.C. and the world had yet to witness, well, basically all of recorded history.

But the Plague of Athens was catastrophic nonetheless, especially to Greek forces who were in the midst of a war with Sparta. Modern researchers have conjectured about the nature of the plague, with some saying it was typhoid, typhus fever, smallpox or even anthrax. But its true nature may never be known.

Virtually all of the information we have comes from Thucydides, who traced its roots to Ethiopia and said a third of the city's people perished as a result. He's as good a source as any, considering Thucydides himself also contracted it.

Source and references

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2027479_2027486_2027547,00.html

http://www.news.com.au/world/man-steals-ebola-patients-phone-gets-infected/story-fndir2ev-1226459437959

Nice compilation. I pray this ebola will not join a list like dis in future

azat: Nice compilation. I pray this ebola will not join a list like dis in future

Thanks. The purpose of the article is to underscore the magnitude of the danger that we face if things get out of hand.

Consider where it said that the Black Death killed only 11 per cent of those infected, in terrifying contrast to ebola which kills more than 60 per cent of those infected!

Hmmm. i bind and cast