Incredible facts
Pandemics have wreaked havoc around the world throughout human history, often changing the course of events in the global order.
Diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, SARS, and Ebola have become part of history and have claimed the lives of millions of people.
What is the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic
It is believed that an epidemic occurs when a contagious disease affects one country or region, and during a pandemic, the disease crosses borders and affects many countries or regions.
According to the WHO (World Health Organization), a pandemic is announced when a new disease to which people are not immune spreads around the world, affecting large numbers of people beyond expectations.
There have been some of the worst pandemics in history, which have taken the lives of millions of people around the world.
The worst pandemics in the history of the
Antoninov plague (165)
Mortality rate: 5 million people
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Also known as the “Galena plague,” Antonina plague was an ancient pandemic that affected Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, and Italy. It was believed to be caused by smallpox, although the true cause is still unknown.
Symptoms included fever, sore throat, diarrhoea, swollen throat, and cough.
This unknown disease was brought to Rome by soldiers returning from Mesopotamia around 165 AD. Unknowingly, they spread a disease that killed more than 5 million people, killed a third of the population, and devastated the Roman army.
Justinian plague (541-542)
Mortality rate: 25 to 50 million people
The Justinian plague killed at least half of Europe's population, covering the Byzantine Empire and Mediterranean port cities.
Symptoms included fever, headache, chills, swollen or painful lymph nodes, abdominal pain, and gangrene.
This is believed to be the first recorded case of bubonic plague. When it reached Constantinople at the height of the pandemic, it took about 5,000 people a day.
In the end, according to various estimates, it killed about 25 to 50 million people, killing about 26 percent of the world's population at the time.
Black Death (1346 – 1353)
Mortality rate: 75 to 200 million people
© Wikimedia
From 1346 to 1353, an outbreak of plague spread across Europe, Africa, and Asia, and caused the death of about a third of the world's population at the time.
It is believed that the plague originated in Asia and spread to other continents through fleas carried by black rats, often found on merchant ships. Symptoms of bubonic plague included black furuncles, vomiting, fever, chills, diarrhea, and pain.
Ports, which were major urban centers at the time, were ideal breeding grounds for rats and fleas, and so the insidious bacterium flourished, devastating three continents along its way.
Read also: The 10 worst epidemics
Cocoliztli Epidemic (1545 – 1548)
Mortality rate: 15 million people
From the Aztec language, “cocoliztli” means “pest”. The infection that caused the epidemic was a form of viral haemorrhagic fever that killed 15 million people in Mexico and Central America. For a population already weakened by a severe drought, the disease has become catastrophic.
However, recent studies have shown that humans have been infected with a salmonella subspecies known as S. paratyphi C, which causes intestinal fever, a category of fever that includes abdominal fever typhus.
The third cholera pandemic (1852 – 1860)
Death rate: 12 million people
© Wikipedia
The third major cholera outbreak in the 19th century lasted from 1852 to 1860. Symptoms included diarrhoea, vomiting, muscle spasms, and cold skin.
Overall, it is considered the deadliest of the seven cholera pandemics. Like the first two pandemics, a third cholera pandemic originated in India, spreading from the Ganges Delta to Asia, Europe, North America and Africa, killing more than 12 million people.
British physician Jon Snow, who worked in a poor area of London, found that the source of infection was contaminated water.
Russian flu (1889 – 1890)
Mortality rate: 1 million people
It was originally known as “Asian flu” or “Russian flu”, as the first cases were reported in Russia. Within four months, the disease spread to the rest of the world due to rapid population growth in the 19th century. In just five weeks, the epidemic reached its peak in mortality. People complained of fever, headache, and runny nose.
For some time it was thought to be an outbreak of influenza A subtype H2N2, but recent studies have found that the cause was the H3N8 influenza A virus.
This was the first real epidemic in the age of bacteriology, and we learned a lot from it. As a result, the 1889-1890 influenza pandemic claimed the lives of more than a million people.
The sixth cholera pandemic (1910 – 1911)
Mortality rate: about 1 million people
Like previous outbreaks, the sixth cholera pandemic originated in India, where it killed more than 800,000 people before spreading to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
It was also the source of the last cholera outbreak in America (1910-1911).
Spanish flu (1918)
Mortality rate: 17 to 50 to 100 million people
© The Everett Collection
Between 1918 and 1920, a deadly influenza outbreak spread across the world, infecting more than a third of the world's population and killing 20 to 50 million people. Main symptoms: fever, cough, tiredness, difficulty breathing, severe cold
Although it is believed to have originated in China as an avian influenza virus, it is referred to as Spanish flu due to reports of an outbreak of influenza in the spring of 1918 in Madrid.
What sets the Spanish flu pandemic apart from other flu outbreaks is the victims of the pandemic. Whereas the flu used to kill only minors, elderly or already weakened patients, during the 1918 pandemic, it began to hurt strong and perfectly healthy people, while children and people with weaker immune systems survived.
Of the 500 million people infected during the 1918 pandemic, the death rate ranged from 10% to 20%, with up to 25 million deaths in the first 25 weeks.
Asian flu (1956 -1958)
Death rate: 2 million people
Symptoms: fever, body aches, chills, coughing, weakness, and loss of appetite.
Asian influenza became a pandemic of the H2N2 influenza A outbreak that occurred in China in 1956 and lasted until 1958
Over a two-year period, the Asian flu spread from Guizhou Province of China to Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States.
The death rate from Asian influenza varies by source, but WHO estimates that approximately 2 million people worldwide have died.
Hong Kong flu (1968)
Death rate: 2 million people
The category 2 influenza pandemic, sometimes referred to as the “Hong Kong” pandemic in 1968, was caused by the H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, a genetic offshoot of the H2N2 subtype.
The first reported case was recorded on July 13, 1968. In just 17 days, the virus was detected in Singapore and Vietnam, and three months later it spread to the Philippines, India, Australia, Europe and the US.
Although the 1968 pandemic had a relatively low mortality rate, it still killed more than a million people, including 500,000 Hong Kong residents, which is about 15 percent of the population in that time.
HIV/ AIDS (since 1980)
Death rate: 36 million people
© Science Photo Library
HIV/AIDS was first detected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1976.
It has truly become a global pandemic and has claimed the lives of more than 36 million people around the world.
Symptoms include fever, rapid weight loss, diarrhea, pneumonia, and sore throat.
More than 36 million people are currently living with HIV, and the vast majority of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, where about 5 per cent of the population, or about 21, is infected million people.
As awareness of the disease increased, new treatments have been developed, making HIV more manageable and many people continue to lead normal lives.
Between 2005 and 2012, global annual deaths fell from 2.2 million to 1.6 million.
21st Century Epidemics and Pandemics The SARS-CoV
outbreak (2002-2003)
Death rate: 774 people
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) caused by the SARS-CoV coronavirus was discovered in 2002-2003. The disease spread rapidly to 37 countries around the world within a few weeks. Symptoms of ARVI included fever, chills, body aches, and usually turned into pneumonia.
This outbreak was first detected in Guangdong Province in China in November 2002. More than 8,000 people from 29 different countries were infected, and the death rate was 774.
By the end of July 2003, no new cases had been reported and WHO announced that the global outbreak had ended. However, health professionals fear that the virus may still exist in some animal populations and cause diseases in humans in the future.
H1N1 swine flu pandemic (2009-2010)
Mortality rate: 151,700 – 575,400 people
© The Everett Collection
The 2009 swine flu pandemic was caused by a new strain of H1N1, which originated in Mexico in spring 2009 and then spread to the rest of the world.
In one year, the virus infected 1.4 billion people worldwide and, according to various estimates, caused the death of 151,700 to 575,400 people.
The 2009 influenza pandemic primarily affected children and young people, and 80% of deaths were among people under 65 years of age. This was unusual, given that most strains of influenza viruses, including seasonal influenza, cause the highest death rate among people over 65 years of age.
However, in the case of swine flu, older people appear to have accumulated sufficient immunity to the H1N1 virus group, so they were not so affected.
The H1N1 vaccine, which causes swine flu, is now included in the annual flu vaccine.
Ebola epidemic in West Africa (2014-2016)
Mortality rate: 11,325 people
Ebola raged in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, with 28,600 cases and 11,325 deaths.
The first case was reported in December 2013 in Guinea, and then the disease quickly spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Most cases and deaths occurred in these three countries, and fewer in Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, the US, and Europe.
There is no specific treatment for Ebola, although efforts to find a vaccine are continuing.
Zika fever epidemic (since 2015)
The effects of the recent Zika epidemic in South and Central America will not be fully known for several more years. The Zika virus is usually spread primarily through Aedes aegypti yellow-febrile mosquitoes, although it can also be sexually transmitted in humans.
Although the Zika virus is generally not a major threat to adults and children, it can infect children who are still in the womb and cause birth defects. The type of mosquito that carries Zika lives primarily in warm, humid climates, making South and Central America, as well as parts of the southern United States, the main areas of distribution virus.
COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic (since 2019)
© Pexels
Since December 2019, a novel coronavirus has appeared in the Wuhan District of China. It was named Covid-19, an abbreviated form for “coronavirus disease 2019”.
This new virus has begun to spread incredibly rapidly among humans due to the novelty — no one on earth is immune to Covid-19 because no one had Covid-19 until 2019.
Although originally considered an epidemic in China, the virus spread across the globe within a few months.
In March 2020, WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic. To date, the number of infected people has exceeded 1 million, and the death toll is more than 50,000.
Table: History of pandemics
